Wonderfully delivers on the concept of playing as an archaeologist uncovering the history and the lost language of the world you're placed in, and unlike most games, Heaven's Vault really does let you explore and uncover history rather than just passively collect logs and notes. An essential difference is that this game will allow you to speculate and be wrong, and put your wrong assumptions on the timeline the same way it would correct ones, and have reactions and unique dialogue prepared for them, which means that you as a player do actually need to pay attention, and amend past mistakes, and cross-reference your knowledge to reach proper conclusions. This is present in both the translation minigame and the general exploration/dialogue portions.
The meat of the gameplay is deciphering an ancient language, and in my view, it's executed wonderfully. There are literally hundreds of samples of text for you to collect and reference, and by the end of the game you are likely to actually be able to read this (actually functional) language and recognize most of the graphemes, which feels incredibly gratifying. The game also provides a few opportunities to flex this knowledge in more... practical applications which serves to further that sense of real accomplishment as well.
The other major part of the game is exploring and talking to people with some (relatively light, depending on how you choose to approach it) investigation elements. Things are more standard in this part with not as many interesting mechanics, but it's worth noting that the writing and the mystery itself are top of the range in terms of what you may generally see in videogames. It's very rare to be able to play a game and say "The writing here is good" without having to add "...for a game". Basically, what I'm saying is that I would still be able to recommend Heaven's Vault even if it were a book.
This recommendation comes with a qualifier that the game DOES still feel about as smooth to play as chewing a bag of nails when you're starting out. The amount of little (and not so little) annoyances during gameplay is immense, and there is so much space for quality-of-life improvements (list of known graphemes for translations, better indication of what your character is about to say on any given generic "remark" or "question" prompt, etc.), and yet the good parts were good enough to win me over, despite me very much being a gameplay-first person. You have to teach yourself to trust this game: trust that it will bring up that one topic you didn't get to explore in a conversation, that it will remember one of your previous actions, that it will give you a chance to correct a mistake in deduction with new information, and so on; and once you get used to this approach, as well as the unconventional dialogue flow, and make peace with inability to manually save and try things out, you're in for a truly unique experience.
The meat of the gameplay is deciphering an ancient language, and in my view, it's executed wonderfully. There are literally hundreds of samples of text for you to collect and reference, and by the end of the game you are likely to actually be able to read this (actually functional) language and recognize most of the graphemes, which feels incredibly gratifying. The game also provides a few opportunities to flex this knowledge in more... practical applications which serves to further that sense of real accomplishment as well.
The other major part of the game is exploring and talking to people with some (relatively light, depending on how you choose to approach it) investigation elements. Things are more standard in this part with not as many interesting mechanics, but it's worth noting that the writing and the mystery itself are top of the range in terms of what you may generally see in videogames. It's very rare to be able to play a game and say "The writing here is good" without having to add "...for a game". Basically, what I'm saying is that I would still be able to recommend Heaven's Vault even if it were a book.
This recommendation comes with a qualifier that the game DOES still feel about as smooth to play as chewing a bag of nails when you're starting out. The amount of little (and not so little) annoyances during gameplay is immense, and there is so much space for quality-of-life improvements (list of known graphemes for translations, better indication of what your character is about to say on any given generic "remark" or "question" prompt, etc.), and yet the good parts were good enough to win me over, despite me very much being a gameplay-first person. You have to teach yourself to trust this game: trust that it will bring up that one topic you didn't get to explore in a conversation, that it will remember one of your previous actions, that it will give you a chance to correct a mistake in deduction with new information, and so on; and once you get used to this approach, as well as the unconventional dialogue flow, and make peace with inability to manually save and try things out, you're in for a truly unique experience.