A promising game that tries to do too much

It’s so disappointing to see a great game come along that falls shorts because it keeps getting in its own way.

I don’t know what went wrong with Heaven’s Vault. Developer Inkle Studios has done enough strong work over the years for me to go into any of their games with confidence and curiosity. I still feel that way even now. But I’m disappointed with this latest game.

Let’s start with what works. There’s a great idea at the core, for one. Heaven’s Vault is a story-driven adventure game in which you play as fantasy space archaeologist Aliya Elasra as she researches a lost alien civilization and tries to decode its written language.

Your investigation spans multiple planets in Aliya’s home Nebula, a completely foreign society (really, set of societies) that comes to life organically as you dig deeper into your investigation. Finding and collecting relics of the past from dusty sites of archaeological interest represents a huge piece of the game, as does puzzling out the letters and words making up the lost language.

But your journey also brings you to the more heavily populated locations of the Nebula as you search for clues and seek help from local experts. This side of your research exposes the inner workings of the different communities you’re interacting with — an important piece of the puzzle, since the central mystery ties into the Nebula’s deeper history.

It’s a credit to Inkle’s writing team that this potential minefield of dense narrative exposition goes down smoothly. Even though it’s not part of the main story, it took only a few hours for context to make clear the social stratification that defines life on the Nebula’s different populated worlds. No one has much depth outside of Aliya, but as vessels of information the supporting cast in Heaven’s Vault is essential.

The story is also extremely malleable. I didn’t get for myself firsthand just how much it can change on repeat playthroughs — more on why in a bit — but from what I did see there’s a lot of open-endedness in how you interact with various beings and the order in which you investigate various leads. 

Some occurrences are timed and can be missed, others only come about because you strike a particular bargain or respond to characters in a certain way. Branching dialogue and narrative paths aren’t new ideas, but they feel relatively seamless here.

The coolest thing Heaven’s Vault does is set you to the task of decoding an unknown alien language.

The coolest thing Heaven’s Vault does, though, is set you to the task of decoding an unknown alien language. Many of the ancient objects you come across feature a few words or a phrase in this mysterious script. In the early going, you’re basically just making guesses based on context and readable phrasing.

It works like this: a shred of alien text appears at the top of the screen. Sometimes you have to figure out where the spacing breaks are between multiple words, other times it’s done for you. Each word you haven’t locked a translation for yet is an empty space with multiple options you can slot in. 

You can go back at anytime and look at your past discoveries or tweak translations you guessed at earlier. The game handles some of the heavy lifting here — it’s smart enough to recognize when you’ve spotted a particular word and context around it often enough to lock the translation. But a good deal of the guesswork is meant to come from clues you pick up as you investigate.

Over time, what seemed at first like random stabs in the dark at what a word might mean starts to emerge as more of a slowly forming puzzle. You begin seeing patterns form in the alien lettering and punctuation, especially as you lock in a set of translated words with similar spellings and meanings. 

All of a sudden, what were once random guesses become informed speculation. You’ll notice some little symbol that recurs in certain types of words or a familiar pattern of letters in a larger word and use your powers of deduction in tandem with the multiple choice selection of likely translations to make an informed choice.

In short, you come to feel like you actually are piecing together the strands of a lost language. It’s an unusual puzzle for a video game, but it ends up working out well as the vibe transforms from trial-and-error guesswork to “I am the Sherlock MFing Holmes of fictional alien languages!!”

Now for the bad news. As much as I enjoyed all of these elements, I ended up quitting Heaven’s Vault completely after around 20 hours. The culprit in my specific case was a technical issue that I didn’t put in the effort to solve, but in truth I was burned out well before I got stuck in an endless loop.

I ended up quitting Heaven’s Vault completely after around 20 hours.

Let’s talk about that loop, though. It happened during one of the many ship-flying sequences in Heaven’s Vault that spring up anytime you head from one destination to another. All of the planets in the Nebula are connected by “rivers” of… whatever. Let’s call it flowing space.

Your ship sails along on these currents during minimally playable sequences that see you trying to stay centered in the current in order to maximize your speed. The sequences themselves stretch on for many minutes. Sometimes, when you don’t have a precise location locked in, you have to depend on frequently unreliable directions guidance from your robot companion, Six.

That’s how I got caught in a loop. I was on my way to a known location when the robot’s directions started sending me in a repeating loop. I tried for more than 30 minutes to break out of the cycle, to no avail. The in-game map is difficult to follow and only visible on the pause screen. I quit out of frustration and never returned. 

Even before my game glitched out, it was clear that the flying sequences are dull momentum killers. You sometimes come across ruins or wrecks where Six can be dispatched to explore and often return with some new relic for you to examine. There’s also dialogue that can play out while you’re flying.

But the cost is too high. I dozed off multiple times during evening play sessions whenever a flying sequence sprang up because they’re so frustratingly long. It’s neat the first few times you do it; the Nebula’s open spaces paint a pretty picture. 

But it quickly becomes clear that the scenery changes very little as you move from place to place. It also serves no apparent purpose in the larger story and ends up feeling like a time-filler in a game that’s already long enough to not need it. The relics you collect during your space journeys are undeniably helpful, but the journeys themselves stretch on for way too long.

That’s not the only area where Heaven’s Vault disregards your time. Six is a near-constant companion whenever Aliya’s doing her archaeologist thing on the ground. It’s a welcome presence a lot of the time, offering observations and insights that help you better understand the game’s unfolding mystery.

But Six is also a giant scaredy-cat, and it never hesitates to remind you of that fact. Anytime you dare do something that carries even the remote whiff of danger, like jumping across a narrow gap, Six will butt in to complain. It’s always a thing to the point that all movement stops while you go back and forth with the robot on the merits of doing something you, the player, have already committed to in your own head.

It’s not helpful. It doesn’t serve any real purpose inside the story. And just like the flying sequences, it is an enormous momentum-killer. Maybe there were dialogue options with Six earlier in the game that would have left me with a less vocal robot. But in my version of the Heaven’s Vault story, the robot is an inescapable pain in the ass who screeches in fear at the most mundane shit.

Every time it happened, I wanted to scream and turn the game off.

I love the central mystery that I spent double-digit hours digging into before I quit. I love the level of detail that’s gone into creating a universe that feels like it exists and has a history. And I’m bowled over at the idea and execution of a central puzzle built around decoding a lost language.

It’s not enough, though. Heaven’s Vault falls short. It wastes too much of your time on things that have no bearing on the mystery you’re chasing. I want to know what happened to Aliya and what she discovered out there in the great unknown, but there are too many hoops to jump through to get there and I’ve reached my limit.