I found Heaven's Vault to be tedious and undirected at best and frustrating at worst. I wasn't invested enough in the characters, story, or world to overcome the gameplay and puzzle mechanics.

Heaven's Vault looks good, but the character animation is purposely not fluid and I don't like it much, though it is unique. The actual art is well done and areas are pretty with quite a bit of variety.

The linguistic puzzle is the main attraction here, and it didn't really work for me at all. The random nature of the discoveries means that much of what you discover is essentially unimportant. This is fine from a language discovery perspective, but it undermines the game, since it isn't clear what contributes to the story and what doesn't. Additionally, many of the archaeological sites feel strange and pointless to explore, because what you are finding is generic and unconnected. Heaven's Vault would be much stronger if the language discovery was designed with more intention.
The actual act of discovering the language is kind of a cool idea, but in practice it feels more like an exercise in shape matching than information analysis. I didn't really ever have a satisfying moment of discovery, I just tried things until the game said I understood more of the language or was stuck.

Most other interaction in the game is through dialog. These are occasionally interesting, but usually antagonistic or stressful for strange and unclear reasons. The whole tone of the game just feels very bad to me.
There is also tedious and pointless sailing between worlds that feels bad and doesn't add anything to the experience.

This is ostensibly a detective story where you are searching for a missing person while also discovering a dead language. The connection between these two things is tenuous, and this lack of motivation makes the game feel scattered.
The game's tone makes this even worse, since it is hard to understand why we want to help any of the hostile jerks we interact with.

I really didn't have a good time with this game. If you are looking for a game about information discovery, Return of the Obra Dinn and Outer Wilds are far better choices.

After thoroughly enjoying the excellent Chants of Sennaar, I was sure this game would be straight up my alley, but unfortunately that didn’t end up being the case.

While both games involve deciphering foreign languages by adding meanings to glyphs through context, those mechanics play a different role in both games. Chants of Sennaar revolves around this mechanic, in Heaven’s Vault it is presented as the main mechanic but in fact it is merely optional - a way to infer more context and lore around the history of its setting. Of course, that is not a bad thing - but if you’re looking for more glyph-sleuthing like me, you might end up disappointed.

Instead, Heaven’s Vault feels more like a point-and-click adventure. You progress by talking to characters and by searching every nook and cranny for artifacts that will lead you to new places with even more artifacts. These artifacts are usually “invisible”, meaning you don’t see them in the game world or in Aliya’s hands when she finds them (they are conveyed simply as a thing you can interact with by pressing the action button), but Aliya will automatically decipher what period and historical site it belongs to, and they sometimes come with a little glyph puzzle. When you have correctly guessed the meaning of a word in two different situations, that translation will be considered accurate and added to your dictionary.

Finding out the meanings of the glyphs, adding more vocabulary, and then going back to the phrases I found previously and seeing how they finally start to make sense, was for me the high point of the game. That’s why I was disappointed that unraveling the Ancients’ language was not a key factor in progressing the story.

That’s clearly a deliberate choice by developer Inkle, because the game is designed in a way that you can completely miss lots of dialogue, meeting characters and even entire locations if you skip over a lot of artifacts or constantly incorrectly guess the meaning of glyphs. Making the glyph translation mandatory for progression would mean certain players could get locked out of progression and completion of the game.

The gameplay that remains, was simply not engaging enough for me. I was constantly fighting the camera and did not feel in control of Aliya as she constantly moved around on her own, sometimes even locking me out of areas that I wasn’t done exploring. I played this on Nintendo Switch and I really regret it - the constant stuttering was driving me insane and the game even crashed twice (luckily the autosave is good). Audio kept cutting out as well though that problem doesn’t seem to be limited to the Switch. All of these technical and control issues make a game revolved around exploring very tough to enjoy.

The story and writing however, did not disappoint. It’s almost a shame how the tedious gameplay kept overshadowing the best parts of the game.

I feel like I would have appreciated this game more if it was presented as a traditional 2D point and click adventure. I still commend Inkle for making a game that is so rich in dialogue and branching paths and the language of the Ancients is incredibly clever and worth piecing together. Good faith to them!

Inkles archaeological mystery buckles under the weight of its ambition.

I had heard the world was fascinating, and uncovering its secrets an interesting language puzzle. The problem is that pretty much everything about the actual game is poorly implemented and dampens any motivation to proceed, from the laborious and repetitive ship sailing to the clunky UI.

A fantastic concept let down by a severe lack of polish and an abundance of utterly tedious gameplay.

The writing sucks but in a funny way so I imagine this would be very good dumb fun if I could play the whole thing, too bad the camera and movement controls are so bad that I get motion sickness if I play for more than 20 minutes at a time. I don't think that's ever happened to me before outside of first person games. This is clearly going for a resident evil 4 sort of thing but that game is like a million times tighter and more precise to play. Way too stiff and awkward and nothing ever feels satisfying even when you do it right. Also the endless references get old fast. I only played for like 2 hours and within that time frame it was already clear that the developers were super afraid that even a single player might not get that they liked Stephen King/Twin Peaks/Lost etc. There's a scene where you get chased by a dude with an axe and they directly mirror the shot from The Shining, and right after that Alan says basically to the camera "He's about to bust down the door like Jack Nicholson in The Shining" and I probably would have quit the game right there if it wasn't so funny. Did the writers and animators just never talk while they worked on this game and no one realized that both the cutscene and the script had included the same obvious reference to The Shining at the exact same time? Anyways if you can sit through the awful gameplay this is probably a very stupidly funny game/tv show to watch.

The only sense of dread I felt from this game was when I anticipated going through another endless woods level shooting 50 copies of one enemy in exactly the same way.

Comparing this to Twin Peaks because it's a Pacific Northwest small town mystery is like comparing tea to piss because both are a yellow liquid. Barebones worldbuilding and mythology, story just cobbled from random plotlines of Stephen King novels.

There's nothing to find in the world, I peaced out after 3 hours, and haven't found a single interesting detail or exploration hook in any of the levels. Twin Peaks is all about building a weird world from many pieces, and Alan Wake just blindly copies the broad strokes and doesn't do any of the legwork.

There's an awful decision to pad out the lore with manuscript pages and radio broadcasts, that you have to stand in one place to listen to. Most of the game you're just running through barren woods, and they couldn't even do you the favor of making these lore-dumps listenable in transit.

Gameplay-wise, one of the most boring games I've ever played. The only thing you get to do in the levels is shoot one type of "zombie" with some of the worst designed gunplay in gaming history.

When you're not doing that, you're walking. Through uninspired, repetitive levels with nothing in them. This "horror" game doesn't attempt to scare you or create atmosphere in any way during these passages, they're just long and empty.

The level I quit on had the premise of Alan running from the cops, and it consists of you simply leisurely jogging through the woods while police lights and radio chatter bob in the distance. That is all. There are no mechanics involved, no attempt to ramp up the drama.

I haven't played Max Payne when I was a kid, and came to Alan Wake from Control, which is one of my favorite games of all time. I'm truly shocked that these two games were made by the same team, by the same author. Control rights everything that is wrong with Alan Wake, so I guess hooray for personal and creative growth for everyone involved.