Heaven's Vault is a narrative-driven adventure game, where players assume the role of Aliya Elasra, an archaeologist exploring ancient ruins and artifacts of a mysterious civilization. The game centers around deciphering a lost language to uncover secrets and piece together the history of the Nebula. The puzzles revolve around symbol and pattern deduction, where the language is visual; for instance, "many people" appear as many lines, and fire is represented as jagged squiggles, symbolizing its chaotic and consuming nature. The game cleverly builds an understanding of the language organically. It starts with simpler words, gradually expanding to prepositions and conjunctions, and then to broader descriptive words by combining simpler pieces until you can construct full sentences. Essentially, you are learning a language in Heaven's Vault. However, the puzzles fail to evolve significantly after the first few hours. Unfortunately, many of the phrases and sentences you translate don't provide much insight or depth to the overall narrative, as most are randomly generated from run to run and usually turn out to be simple proverbs or sayings.

Aside from the puzzles, you will explore diverse open environments. Each setting is visually well-designed to represent the diversity in beliefs and competing cultures within the world of Heaven's Vault, including terraced rice fields, sprawling ruins, and fantasy sci-fi cities with Greek and Middle Eastern stylings. These locations are built into broken moons, and to traverse between them, you sail your "boat" on flows of gas and ice through space. A major gripe is the pace of navigation: you are limited to a casual walk, and a jogging or sprinting option would have alleviated complaints about the traversal speed. Boat navigation shares a similar frustration, as the "ice floes" separating these moons are vast, requiring up to 15 minutes of navigation with minimal engagement since the sailing is on rails, offering only occasional left or right choices and a small boost action.

The story is intriguing. As Aliya, you are tasked with finding the fate of explorer-scientist Renba. You travel with your robot companion, "Six," unraveling the mystery of Renba's whereabouts while uncovering a broader mystery of Heaven's Vault. The characters are well-written, with Six standing out. The robot teeters on sentience, with fragmented memories and a sense of programmed duty. The interplay between Aliya, who has a strong dislike and disregard for robots, and Six is quite enjoyable. I somewhat enjoyed the story, but found the pacing inconsistent due to the open nature of the world. You’ll spend significant time on inconsequential tasks that facilitate minor lore dumps, which move the narrative forward only slightly. Exploring derelict moons littered with artifacts and structures of the old civilization mostly offers additional lore peeks, but often stands in the way of progressing the more interesting main story. This game and its story might have been better suited to a more focused adventure game without the non-essential sailing gameplay and semi-open walking simulator environments.

Heaven's Vault is a slow burn, where any form of payoff comes through the story, and whether it truly is a payoff can likely only be determined by a very particular set of gamers. Expect a slow and meticulous game, rich in lore, with an interesting but poorly paced story and some engaging language-learning puzzles, though it is very minimalistic on gameplay. Personally, I cannot recommend this game.

ride out the clunky gameplay, you get used to its quirks. Everything you discover makes the story richer and deeper. It's simply addictive to uncover more. I can't wait to play it again. I already am!

I thought this game was a play once and done game, but every new game + I encounter something I didn't before. There is a whole conspiracy going on behind the main plot of this game and I think it can be solved if you actually do some detective work. This isn't a game just about discovering a new language and the truth of the Nebula, but a whole murder mystery with multiple suspects.