Delight in Mystery: A Review of ‘Heaven’s Vault’
Our thanks to Inkle for providing an advance review copy of Heaven’s Vault on the Nintendo Switch.
“Sometimes when you find a place, you find it overflowing with humanity.”
– Aliya Elasra, Heaven’s Vault
When studying poetry at university, I recall reading authors who my professor would insist were “at the mercy of translation.” He meant, of course, that translated poetry makes interpretive moves that the original work – if you happen to be fluent in the poem’s native language – did not. However, I did not properly appreciate the severity of what my professor meant at the time, as I was readily able to derive meaning from translated poems just as easily as I was able to dissect something originally published in English.
My feeble attempts at learning Spanish in high school, teaching myself Latin in graduate school, as well as unreliably toggling on DuoLingo alerts for French as a working adult, have amounted to nothing. Maybe I catch a phrase or two here and there, but I am always fundamentally at a distance from whatever cultural work I am consuming when it exists outside the sphere of my native tongue. Some games like the Yakuza series have recently helped me appreciate the painstaking effort that goes into localizing cultural works in English, and I have come to realize the degree to which one’s agency over a translation can drastically impact the received meaning of the original work. A joke which might be culturally insensitive or a reference to a pop star that might be unrecognizable in another country might be saved by the translators (and localizers) who shape the texts with which they work.
Thus my second playthrough of Heaven’s Vault began this January with an inherent suspicion that wasn’t there when I played the game on Steam back in 2019. Only this time, I was effectively the translator. Heaven’s Vault, which has affectionately been described as a “translate-’em-up,” is ultimately an elaborate experiment that interacts with the problem of deriving meaning from unfamiliar language, specifically being – as my university professor would have it – at the “mercy of the translator.” The game mechanics that allow you to piece together an ancient language serve almost as unreliable narrators or, at the very least, approximations akin to a third-person limited perspective on the past. Heaven’s Vault’s smartest mechanic is also the most dubious: translating ancient inscriptions based on symbols and environmental context.
A Fresh Take on Exploration
Before going any further, one thing needs to be said: Heaven’s Vault is one of the most intelligent games I have ever played. I sometimes struggle with approaching the topic of “good writing” in video games because of how subjective that framing of a narrative work can be. With Heaven’s Vault, however, I am confident that anyone with a literary eye or a scriptwriting ear will pick up on the subtleties and flavor text that bring an otherwise non-linear adventure into a focus that feels lively and reactive. For a game ankle-deep in digging up the past, Heaven’s Vault feels like a fresh take on what it means to explore in games.
Branded as an adventure game, it might be easy to compartmentalize Heaven’s Vault into a standard point-and-click affair. But to say that Heaven’s Vault challenges and interrogates the notion of exploration in games is not to overstate the case: this sense of exploration is physical, cultural, historical, linguistic, and associative. Physically, Aliya Elasra and her charming robot companion Six explore distant moons, outposts, abandoned rocks and river currents. Culturally, they reconcile many different ways of life – from slave traders to duplicitous merchants to religious cultists – trying to rectify their earnest search for the truth with the need to respect relativism. Historically, Aliya peruses through the ruins and artifacts of long-abandoned locations, piecing together both a sense of language and cultural practices – which have ironically and tragically been forgotten to time. Linguistically, the quest to gradually learn ancient symbols and piece together fragments of meaning is ongoing, something that can be explored well into Heaven’s Vault’s generous New Game+ mode. And in terms of association, the game gives the player an abundance of opportunities to draw inferences, make conclusions, and choose between possibilities in the plot that truly feel like options – not just a menu of developer-offered “choices.” (“Six will remember that.”)
What Not to Expect From Heaven’s Vault
Though I feel like my praise for Heaven’s Vault has been effusive since I started sailing the Nebula back in 2019, I am keenly aware of how much of a niche game this is. And to that end, let’s talk about what Heaven’s Vault is not. You will never pick up a weapon in Heaven’s Vault, nor will the game present significant challenges to your skill with a controller. The exploration found within Heaven’s Vault comes largely without a fail state. (Though there are locations and set pieces that will negatively impact your overall health, I couldn’t manage to actually achieve a fail state while playing the game normally.) Basically nothing in the game will ever give you negative feedback that you have done something wrong – and I find that approach to be fascinating.
Heaven’s Vault could have easily spawned hostile enemies in its many moons, artificially gating off parts of the Nebula behind some sort of “level” or progression gate. But it doesn’t. Heaven’s Vault is so confident in its singular focus of exploration and adventure paired with an investigative archaeological narrative that it can’t be bothered with such distractions. Rather, Heaven’s Vault thrives because it knows precisely what to trim away from what people otherwise expect from a game.
The Tribulations of Translation
Let’s say that I encounter a particularly intimidating translation sequence where I don’t have certainty in well-over 50% of what I’m guessing the inscription actually says. Heaven’s Vault’s linguistic system never highlights itself red and marks what you’ve done as an error. Instead, the game gives you roughly four options of what a symbol might mean, as well as some prior words and symbols that you have previously encountered, and your task is to make the best guess as to the proper meaning. Sometimes translations are fragments that don’t have the full scope of a sentence, while others might be literal sentences from a book. Whatever the case, Aliya assembles her best estimation of what a phrase says, and that series of interpretations is filed away in her notebook for later review.
The brilliance of this system of language in Heaven’s Vault is that the game gives gradual clues as to whether you are correct about your interpretations of the symbols. Over time, certain redundant characters will be scratched out as “obviously incorrect,” while certain phrases that you have repeatedly guessed will be affirmed as “certain” that they are correct now. As you make a mistake and replace a verb with a noun, for example, Aliya will scratch out her previous guess for that symbol and your four options will be reduced to three. In other words, the game nudges you in the right direction simply for engaging with its linguistic system regardless of the veracity of your initial readings.
Some translations in Heaven’s Vault will feel obvious: you’re standing at the foot of a large statue depicting a Water Goddess, for instance. From environmental context alone, you can safely infer that the menu of potential translations you have in front of you will have something to do with water or the gods. Perhaps you can even deduce that the inscription praises the Water Goddess for bringing fertility to a planet’s crops – something that you would never know if you encountered this word in a library or a book but is abundantly obvious because of where you encountered the language within the world.
Other translations in Heaven’s Vault will feel incoherent or otherworldly: you will be sailing along the rivers that connect the Nebula’s many moons when you encounter an abandoned site, for instance. Perhaps you send Six to hopper down (teleport from the ship to the moon) and he returns with a telescope or a withering scroll. Though such objects always fit into the historical sense of lore within the universe of Heaven’s Vault, many of these objects don’t immediately point Aliya towards her central quest throughout the game. Nor do they, as objects, provide contextual clues for what their inscriptions might reveal. Often, these artifacts will help her narrow down a sense of which undiscovered locations are nearby, but the functionality of these objects isn’t always conceptually transparent; that is, decoding an inscription is not always as obvious as the Water Goddess statue.
Every Action Feels Meaningful
When examining the game’s basic structures of interactivity, specifically regarding themes of archaeology and linguistic anthropology, no action in Heaven’s Vault ultimately feels wasted. Even if you are lacking certainty for the inscriptions you have found, you are adding to an overall database that will, as it populates, better precisify your investigations, pointing you ever-closer to the truth. Furthermore, the game features a number of characters that you can share your discoveries with. You might bring an artifact to Huang, the inquisitive librarian residing on Iox, for instance. Huang will confirm or reject certain elements of your translations and theories, often providing you with additional avenues for research and exploration. Or you might head to Elboreth and encounter Tapi, a snake-tongued merchant whose shop reflects something of a black market. You can swap artifacts that, like Huang’s clues, will help steer you in new or useful directions.
Regardless of your interactions with these characters, the game always presents a number of ways to proceed that feel distinct, even if they ultimately are interchangeable. I distrusted anybody on Iox during my first playthrough, so I never gave away my artifacts or revealed all of my information. I took the opposite approach in this second playthrough and was not disappointed when my interactions led to wildly different progression paths through the narrative.
The Weak Point of Heaven’s Vault
The only distinctly weak point within Heaven’s Vault is the navigation system. As Aliya and Six work their way across the Nebula, sailing on rivers from moon to moon, they will start to carve out familiar routes and paths that – almost like something out of an open world game – fill in the overall map. Exploring the Nebula feels fresh and exciting at first, as there are numerous paths that intersect and connect to create a superhighway of sorts throughout the Nebula. Very quickly, however – and I found this to be the case even more so during the second playthrough – navigation feels stale and tedious. Though I appreciate the commitment to making this Nebula feel interconnected and alive, the actual process of moving from place to place is cumbersome and sometimes unclear.
Somewhere between my first playthrough of Heaven’s Vault and the Nintendo Switch version, Inkle has increased or improved the “fast travel” style solution to this overall navigation problem. With a simple press of the button, Aliya will pass off the control of the Nightingale ship to Six, who will steer you to a point which is just on the edge of where you have previously (manually) explored. While I remember this fast travel feature existing in the initial Steam version, the Switch version seems to have increased the frequency with which Six can take over the ship’s navigation. That being said, I still found myself repeatedly taking breaks during my second playthrough because I would get frustrated at how much sailing there was in between the interesting bits – particularly when I wanted to seek out a new location.
I lost count of how many times Six would tell me to “take the next right,” only to encounter a reset prompt indicating that I had taken the wrong turn. Even worse, I would open my mini-map to look at the river paths only for Six (and the game) to steer me away from my new destination. I’d be seeking out an ancient library, for instance, and clearly the next right was the path towards that location; Six would tell me to steer the opposite way and if I took the correct path, the game would prompt me to reset the Nightingale. I could never make sense of why the game circuitously looped me around the destination that I saw on the map. I outright ignored these reset prompts by the middle of my second playthrough and my time was better spent for it. Perhaps the game wanted me to take the scenic route, even if all roads led to Rome.
Minor Bugs & Performance Issues
In finding some minor faults with Heaven’s Vault, this second playthrough on the Switch added an extra nag that I couldn’t ever figure out a workaround for – which leads me to conclude that this is a bug, one that I didn’t experience in my first playthrough. Every time I would open up the mini-map, it would zoom in on Renaki – a distant planet far off from the central hub of Iox, Elboreth, and Maersi. I had selected Renaki as a destination for sailing around my third hour of this playthrough but the map never moved on. Without fail – whether I was returning to a moon I’d visited previously or navigating towards somewhere new – I would open up the mini-map and spend a few seconds zooming all the way out from Renaki. I was nowhere near Renaki nor did I have it pegged as my next destination; I would even have my current route marked on the map. But every single time the game would zoom all the way in on Renaki as if I was already there.
These repeated few seconds of zooming out from Renaki and relocating where my ship actually was increasingly annoyed me, and I could not figure out a way to prevent this from happening over the next 15 hours or so. I honestly thought that I had missed something important for the story on Renaki so I made two additional trips to the moon and found nothing substantial. I found this technical frustration to be a great disappointment because the rest of the game is so successful at helping you sculpt the way you’d like to spend your time in the Nebula.
On the subject of potential bugs and performance issues, I only ran into a few superficial elements worthy of critique with this otherwise substantial Nintendo Switch port. One such performance compromise between the Switch version and the PC version that I played previously is the introduction of microstutters. When I think on my time with the PC version of Heaven’s Vault, I can’t find a single fault. But the Switch version struggles at random intervals to keep up with the frame pacing and thus, in unexpected and inconsistent bursts, the game will rapidly catch up from where it briefly paused. These screen hitches happen within the scope of two seconds, so they aren’t truly awful, but they’re annoying in the face of the smoother PC version.
Another minor issue I ran into that was absent in the PC version took place on the rivers. These rivers feature clouds and rocks and all sorts of geographical set dressing built throughout, many of which are quite beautiful. The Switch version, however, repeatedly obfuscated my vision while navigating, interrupting the scene with ugly black cloud particles. It was as if I was sailing through the cloud itself but instead of a translucent pass through, it almost looked like screen static. It was a simple enough issue that I could resolve by adjusting my camera up or down while sailing, which served to hide the particles from view. But these particles didn’t stand out whatsoever in the PC version. I was surprised at just how often they plagued my travels in this go around the Nebula, where I couldn’t help but wonder if this visual annoyance was a symptom of being downscaled to the Switch’s paltry resolution.
What Makes Heaven’s Vault So Impressive
These performance issues aside, it’s worth noting that the rest of the game worked flawlessly. Translating inscriptions always went smoothly, as did my general inputs and exploration of the world. There’s a reason that Sam Barlow mentioned Heaven’s Vault when questioned with which games made him reapproach what gaming can do as a medium. If you can forgive the superficial flaws, I think Heaven’s Vault is an excellent Switch port that does some truly impressive things from a design perspective – things you will never see in other games, indie or otherwise.
While it isn’t a graphical tour de force, Heaven’s Vault is a game that I consider to be pressing against the boundaries of gaming, specifically the limits of interactivity. The question of how far these limits have been pushed with Heaven’s Vault is up for debate. However, I don’t think anyone who engages with its brilliant linguistic system will be disappointed in what the game has to offer. Somewhere between the lack of fail state, the creative and interpretive license given to the player, and the genuine mystery of how this language reveals hidden facets of bygone eras, Heaven’s Vault manages to offer up something that rejects the notion of playing through the same way twice.
“Choice Matters” – Except it Actually Does
This Platonic idea of a game that feels organically different every time you play it is such a trite and bromide notion bandied about within the games industry. No offense to Telltale’s adventure games – which arguably popularized this obsession with choice and replayability – but most in-game consequences that the industry promises ring hollow in second and third playthroughs. For all the pretense of choice mattering, games of this ilk are laughably linear. Heaven’s Vault, however, strikes me as one of the truly successful instances of non-linear storytelling. Part of why it succeeds for me is because the game’s script dynamically adapts to your actions.
When thinking on Heaven’s Vault’s writing specifically, I am now reminded of my recent time with Hades, a massively successful indie game from 2020 that topped many people’s game of the year lists. Hades is remarkable as a piece of games writing because it feels practically bottomless with how it will respond to player actions. If you die to an early boss in Hades, the characters back at the start will comment on your loss. If you overcome the final boss, characters will also have something relevant to say. At every turn, just when you think you might have outsmarted the game and things will begin to repeat, Hades outdoes itself. In this same way, Heaven’s Vault always feels alive and reactive to what I’ve recently done. Maybe I’m parsing through ancient artifacts or discovering a far-off site of research. But whatever I am doing, Heaven’s Vault knows it and, from a writing perspective, has something useful and specific to offer me as a player in response to how I have recently spent my time and conducted my according choices.
Similarly to Hades, which somehow rids the player of the common feeling that death is a punishment, Heaven’s Vault’s lack of fail state actually encourages the player to keep going when they have made a mistake. Perhaps I get a translation wrong or sell off an important artifact in the same way that I get killed in a fight in Hades. In both cases, each game accounts for that “failure” ahead of time. Both games deliberately choose to incorporate my failure in a way that is genuinely beneficial to my next attempt. If I die in Hades, I now have more resources to invest in making my character stronger. If I get a translation wrong in Heaven’s Vault, I now have narrowed the shortlist of words that it could be. I am, in fact, closer to the truth after getting it wrong than I was before guessing at all.
Landing Among the Sci-Fi Stars
Heaven’s Vault is also effortlessly articulate. A classic lesson in creative writing is to show don’t tell. But Heaven’s Vault takes that a step further by further divorcing the story’s immediate meaning from its multifaceted layers of mystery: mystery about Janniqi Renba, mystery about ancient civilization, mystery about robot sentience, mystery about dead languages, mystery about the elusive Heaven’s Vault. Describing this game as articulate is not just to compliment its breadth and diversity of vocabulary, nor its confidently written characters who are challengingly distinct. It’s to compliment how planned out and meticulous each and every detail in this game is. As I play, I can feel the creators – the “hand of God” so to speak – orchestrating everything from the laws of physics to the implicit hierarchical structures within society. And the best part? Not a single detail is wasted in the entire runtime of the game.
With no exaggeration, it is astounding that a game like Heaven’s Vault exists. The game feels like an authentic slice of a larger sci-fi universe akin to canonical behemoths in the genre like Stargate or Dune. I also can’t escape the classic Doctor Who comparison in my mind, notably how Aliya’s relationship with Six parallels the Doctor’s relationship with his robot dog K9. (Perhaps that comparison was inevitable from the first time either robot uttered the word “mistress.”) I have previously explored the notion that sci-fi settings – space in particular – rarely work for me within games because of how they often substitute scale for depth, scope for clarity, and – most crucially – spectacle for human drama. Heaven’s Vault always remains deeply human even as your hours are spent with a robot companion amid the stars.
Whenever I write about games, I listen to the soundtrack. With this piece of writing, Lawrence Chapman’s score instantly transports me back into the Nebula. From the moment the game boots up, the game vacillates between sweeping orchestral inflections and near silence. The score is never subtle, but that works surprisingly well for a game like this which is deliberately fractured in terms of its pacing. Cheesy as this nostalgic comparison may sound, I couldn’t help but feel my memories of Zelda games stirred up when the score would waltz into center stage. In the same way that I felt reward and excitement when I first opened a chest in Ocarina of Time, I felt similar emotions when taking my first steps onto a new moon and beholding deserted dwellings and forgotten machines in Heaven’s Vault. Even those lamentable rivers that I whinged about earlier are made bearable by the relaxing and contemplative blend of strings and piano.
When reflecting on my time with Heaven’s Vault, I incessantly compare my first experience in 2019 to my recent playthrough on the Switch in 2021. So much of my focus has shifted in that time, whether I’m thinking about my relationship to writing and gaming, and yet I find myself coming to similar conclusions this go around. I have written previously about how I find Aliya Elasra to be a masterfully executed character that exemplifies complex and dignified portrayals of women in protagonist roles within gaming, and I would echo those thoughts again now. I also think that some people will find Heaven’s Vault to be completely boring, which I’ll transparently admit because I think the developers know that too. In the same way that many people shrink away from dense philosophical topics because they’re “too deep,” I think people will shrink away from the intellectually foreign task of linguistic anthropology as a game mechanic.
A Game For Everybody: Is This A Meaningful Goal in Gaming?
Art is meaningless if it has nothing to say, particularly when concerned with appealing to as many people as possible. To that end, Heaven’s Vault is pregnant with meaning, as it has so much to say to a very specific group of people. My hope is that this review serves as the Arecibo message sent out into the universe of that specific group of people. I hope they are listening.
Heaven’s Vault is not a game for everybody. It is never the kind of game that would gain traction in the pop culture sphere of something like Geoff Keighley’s annual Game Awards. But I can also say that Heaven’s Vault is a game that feels perfectly tailored to me. It is exactly the kind of refreshingly original yet comforting approach to game design that made me fall in love with its gameplay systems, which had me completely hooked throughout both playthroughs. If you remotely care about human culture and its history, how we came to inherit our languages and beliefs and traditions, why we have developed cultural lore, why we have abandoned areas of the world while inhabiting others, how human civilization will survive collapses even into the distant future – and you want to experience these questions in an interactive art medium – then there is something you will care about that is worth finding in Heaven’s Vault.
Like Aliya, you cannot guarantee that you will ever reach the bottom of every mystery in the same way that you may never have a fully fluent translation of what dead civilizations had to say. But sometimes when you find a game, you find it overflowing with humanity. I found Heaven’s Vault overflowing with humanity. To describe my journey as remarkable completely undersells the case. Though you are at the mercy of my translation, Heaven’s Vault earns every ounce of praise that I could possibly award it.
Thank you for reading. Your Patreon support keeps our community entirely Ad free.
