The Banished Vault

I keep a spreadsheet for most strategy games. The Banished Vault made me reach for actual paper. That should tell you everything about where this one sits on the depth spectrum, but let me be precise about what that depth actually looks like before you either close this tab or open your wallet. You command the Auriga Vault, a gothic interstellar monastery crewed by exiles fleeing an encroaching darkness called the Gloom. Each run drops you into a procedurally generated solar system where your first job is always the same: manufacture enough Stasis, a substance requiring water, titanium, and CO2, to keep your crew in hibernation for the next jump. To do that you dispatch ships from the Vault, construct outposts on planetary surfaces and in orbit, harvest raw materials, and chain those materials into finished goods across a web of logistics that spans the entire system. The core loop is turn-based, and every turn you spend is a turn the Gloom gets closer. Four Scriptoriums must be built on hallowed planets to complete a run, which means you cannot just camp one rich system and grind it dry. You have to move, and moving costs fuel, and fuel costs mass, and mass costs range. The game uses a simplified but genuinely punishing rocket equation: load your ships too heavy and they cannot reach distant targets; travel light and you may arrive at a resource-poor planet unable to build what you need to get home. A rescue mission born from one miscalculation is not a dramatic story the game tells you, it is a consequence you produce yourself, entirely from numbers you controlled badly. The thing critics and players split on is how manual all of this feels. There is no automation in The Banished Vault. Each exile has action points, and if you need four units of CO2 from a harvester, you click four times. Multiply that across multiple exiles running parallel operations on different planets and the micromanagement load is real. PC Gamer called it "really bloody arduous", and that is a fair read for anyone expecting delegated workers and build queues. Strategy players who like keeping every decision inside their own skull, however, will find the granularity intoxicating rather than exhausting. The in-game calculator helps. The extensive hand-drawn manual, available digitally and as a physical purchase, functions as a proper reference rather than a gesture at one, and reading it before a run is time genuinely well spent. Players who skip it and bounce off the opening hours are almost always players who skipped the manual. The aesthetic earns its own paragraph. The art direction is hand-drawn, board-game-adjacent, and deeply readable at a glance, which turns out to matter enormously when you are tracking simultaneous operations across a system. The setting mixes hard science-fiction logistics with gothic religious imagery in a way that is not ironic or campy, it is cohesive. The Gloom functions as both mechanical pressure and atmosphere. Ship research adds some variety across runs, though community feedback notes that a couple of hulls, the Avocet and Caracal, tend to outperform most of the unlock tree, which flattens late-run build diversity more than the game probably intends. Roguelite fans expecting the broad lateral build variety of something like FTL will find the option space narrower than expected. What is here is deliberate and austere rather than sprawling. Who should buy this: anyone who genuinely enjoys optimizing logistics chains under time pressure, who finds the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation interesting rather than threatening, and who is comfortable with a game that offers no automated safety nets. It is not a casual Tuesday purchase. It is a long-weekend commitment with a notebook. The Metacritic critic pool is small but the Steam user score sits at 78 percent mostly positive, which is about right for a game this opinionated about its own difficulty. Newcomers to the genre should still consider it accessible if they invest in the manual first, because the core concepts are clean even when the execution demands precision.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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