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.
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.