Heaven’s Vault

★★★★★

A fascinating game of exploration. You play an archaeologist sailing between “moons” in a habitable nebula linked by rivers, exploring ruins, interacting with townspeople, and translating ancient inscriptions. What starts as a simple quest to find a missing person ultimately reveals surprising truths about the history of the nebula and its people.

Aliya (the main character) is determined, snarky (to a lesser or greater extent depending on your dialog choices), and has complicated relationships with the people of the poor moon she came from and the wealthy moon where she now lives. She’s accompanied by a robot she calls Six, who manages to hold its own conversationally. When you’re out exploring or sailing, you can guide conversations between the two of them that can not only reveal lore to the player, but open different options for character actions as well.

The graphics are a mix of 3D environments and paper cut-out characters, the designs influenced by Middle Eastern architecture and clothing.

Translating Ancient

The Ancient script is hieroglyphic, with words that look like they’re made up of flowing letters. After a while you start recognizing the symbols that indicate concepts like all, place, water, person, or movement, as they appear in words meaning things like emperor, garden, or river. It helps that some of the glyphs have a connection between how they look and what they mean.

Translating is a fun challenge. When you find an inscription, you get a string of symbols and a set of words that the character knows or suspects, and try to fit the words to the symbols. As you translate more inscriptions, and she becomes more certain of words’ meanings, you also get more options.

Sailing and Exploring

Sailing between moons on the rivers is kind of a zen experience. You don’t need to dodge obstacles, though you do need to choose which fork to take to get to your destination. But they all loop back on each other in a complex web, so even if you didn’t have the option to back up when you take the wrong fork, it wouldn’t be a major problem.

The ruins contain puzzles (how to get through this locked gate?) and clues (what does this device do?), as do the towns (how do I convince this person to give me the information I need?) Sometimes it can be really tricky to steer a conversation the way you want it to go, and you don’t always get another chance.

Replayable

I’ve played through the game twice so far, and I’ve made different choices and different discoveries each time. There were things I learned the first time through that never even came up the second time around, and vice versa. For “new game plus” you also get to keep (some of?) the vocabulary you’ve built up, and you get longer phrases to translate.

While in most cases the choices you make have only subtle repercussions, there are some that can close off whole moons, or permanently block…or unlock…your ability to interact with certain characters.

There’s more than one way to reach the endgame, though, so you’re never completely locked out of progressing.

Loop Connections

The actual gameplay and story are completely different, but there are some conceptual similarities to Outer Wilds: Both involve traveling through space in a wooden ship within a small inhabited system, exploring ruins (and inscriptions!), and piecing together a history. Most people of the Nebula believe time is a Loop (and Aliya’s study of the past is either a waste of effort or actually a study of the future), while Outer Wilds takes place entirely within an actual time loop. And, well, there’s a bit more, but that would spoil the mysteries of both games.