Heaven's Vault

Heaven's Vault is an adventure game built around one central idea: translation as exploration. You play as Aliya Elasra, a sharp-tongued archaeologist sailing the Nebula - a network of rivers threading through moons - alongside her robot companion Six. The core loop is not combat, not puzzles in the traditional sense, but reading. You find inscriptions carved into ruins, guess at words from context and symbol patterns, and slowly reconstruct a language that has been silent for centuries. It sounds niche, because it is, and it is absolutely worth your time if that sentence made you lean forward rather than close the tab. inkle built their reputation on 80 Days, a game that proved prose could carry a whole experience, and Heaven's Vault doubles down on that conviction. The dialogue is genuinely good - Aliya has opinions, biases, and a habit of being wrong in interesting ways. Your translation guesses accumulate into a personal record, and whether you got a word right or wrong earlier shapes how later inscriptions read. The game remembers your errors. It does not punish them; it folds them into the story, which is a quietly radical design choice. There is a strong central mystery about who built the ancient civilization, what destroyed it, and why it keeps echoing into the present, and the game earns its ending if you let it breathe. The visual style deserves its own paragraph. Characters move through fully rendered 3D environments but are themselves hand-drawn in a loose, expressive line style that gives the whole thing a graphic novel quality. It is not seamless - the blending of 2D figures against 3D backdrops occasionally looks awkward - but the art direction is clearly intentional and the environments, all crumbling stone and dusty light, carry real atmosphere. Jono Grant's score is understated and worth listening to properly, the kind of ambient work that deepens a mood without announcing itself. Where the game loses people is pacing and navigation. Sailing between locations is slow by design, and the conversation system, while rich, occasionally loops in ways that feel like the game has lost track of what you already know. Some players find the translation mechanic too forgiving, too much guided guessing rather than genuine linguistic discovery. That is a fair read. The archaeology is more metaphor than simulation. If you come expecting a rigorous language-puzzle game you may feel cheated. If you come expecting a meditative story about the weight of history and the stories civilizations leave behind, it delivers that with uncommon sincerity. At around six to eight hours for a first playthrough, Heaven's Vault knows its length. A New Game Plus mode unlocks after completion, letting you revisit the story with full translation knowledge intact, which reframes nearly every early conversation. That second pass is genuinely rewarding - one of the better uses of NG+ in a narrative game. It is a small, specific, handcrafted piece of work from a studio that cares intensely about what it makes.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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