Heaven's Vault is a narrative game with meaningful choices that lets you explore a fascinating and beautiful original world and its history. One of its main mechanics involves deciphering words and sentences in a foreign script, which is implemented in the best way I've ever encountered in 35 years of gaming - find details below.

Let's first talk about the setting though. The game takes place in a unique world where humans live on a couple of small "moons", which are connected by "rivers" that defy our laws of physics, but can be sailed nonetheless. You play as Aliya, a young archaeologist who has found a working age-old ship and explores this strange universe, trying to uncover its forgotten history.

During your voyages, you are accompanied by a robot and meet various interesting characters. You usually choose between two or three dialogue options, and your decisions may affect relations noticeably. The conversations also shine a light on the different cultures of this world, its currently predominant philosophy of "The Loop", the tension between rich and poor communities, or other interesting details. I found them well written and felt very immersed in this world.

You also discover and explore archaeological sites, and gradually unveil a rich, multi-layered history that has been completely forgotten. You'll explore ancient seats of power and knowledge, find remnants of a technology far superior to those of the present, and unravel secrets that might revolutionize the world's understanding of its history, all of which felt very exciting.

Your understanding of the past increases as you decipher text passages on old items that you keep finding. These texts are written in "Ancient", a forgotten language that uses the grammar of our English, but a completely different script based on glyphs. At first you don't know anything about these symbols, but some are easy to guess - e.g. two wavy lines on top of each other might mean "water". Of course, symbols for more abstract concepts like "life" are harder to guess. But once you understood both, and you encounter them next to each other, you realize that they stand for a different word if used together - not "life water", but "blood". Some words consist of 10 individual glyphs or more, each with its own meaning, and each word is its own little puzzle.

This turns the deciphering of the ancient script into an engaging experience. In the beginning you have to guess a lot, you'll often be wrong but you won't notice your mistake until you encounter the same word in a different context. But as your understanding grows, you'll eventually be able to translate an entire story with little difficulty. The game helps you by giving you up to four options for every word (even if you've never seen it), and it also shows you your previous interpretations of words that used the same symbols. It's a bit hard to convey _how much_ I loved this part of the game, but if you experience it yourself, you'll (hopefully ;) ) understand what I mean.

It's worth noting that after completing the game, you can start a "New Game+" with more complex lines to decipher. The story starts again from scratch, but you'll retain your dictionary. There is a rich variety of passages to decipher, and even in my fourth playthrough I'm still finding new words. The different story paths are also good for at least 3 playthroughs, there are many interesting details and secrets to discover.

While I believe that this game can provide an amazing experience for players who share my fascination with foreign scripts (as well as my curiosity for exploring imaginative new worlds), there are also a few caveats worth mentioning:

First and foremost, this is a very slow game in every respect. Movement speed is slow, but you do want to cover the entire area of a scene, because sometimes you find a relic on a patch of ground that doesn't look special in any way. Dialogue is also slow and cannot be skipped, it also often includes important hints. While a conversation is running, you cannot trigger the aforementioned hidden relics, so it's best to stop moving whenever you and your robot exchange some lines, which happens very frequently. Sailing on the rivers is very slow as well, and while you can fast travel, you may not want to do that because you might skip a helpful conversation or miss helpful relics on the way. Personally I felt so immersed in this world that I _liked_ the slow speed, it gave me the opportunity to soak in the atmosphere, relax, and have lots of interesting conversations with my robot. But if your main objective is _progression_ rather than immersion, then I can see it getting annoying.

Second, the game sometimes forced actions on me that I wouldn't have taken. Occasionally it also interpreted my dialogue choices differently from what I expected, or skipped content that I would have liked to explore further - both in terms of locations (once you have left an archaeological site, you cannot visit it again in the same playthrough) and dialogue (dialogue choices often remain available even if you don't immediately take them, but sometimes they don't, for no discernible reason). This bothered me at first, until I decided to just go with the flow of the story (it's a very good one after all) and explore missed options in additional playthroughs.

Third, the controls aren't very user-friendly, which is just a shame considering how much love and attention to detail went into practically every other aspect of the game. You have to use WASD for movement, not even arrow keys work (they move the camera instead, as mouse movement does). You constantly have to be ready to quickly press Q, E, 1, 2, or 3, as dialog opportunities may go away if you aren't fast enough. Keys cannot be rebound. Clicking with the mouse on a dialogue or interaction option only works if there is only one action available, otherwise you have to use the number keys. This didn't stop me from enjoying the game, but it created countless little annoyances along the way. Furthermore, the game stores and displays information in a zoomable "timeline", which is certainly an interesting idea, but clunky to navigate. Even the "language" section of the game could have used some improvements, an interactive dictionary and a proper inventory of inscribed items would have been nice.

Finally, a word about the graphics: While I found the art style very beautiful, it definitely shows that this is an indie title with a lower budget. Characters are represented as cutouts that move across the scene - the cutouts often have several "frames" to create an illusion of movement, and they can change with the viewing angle, but it always remains clear that these are flat 2D drawings moving around in a 3D world. In most scenes, the main character doesn't have feet (her legs simply fade out above the ankle), which probably made it easier to include ramps and stairs. The camera controls are (depending on the scene) sometimes fixed and you may not be able to get the viewing angle you want. Together, these limitations made me dislike the graphics in the beginning, but they actually grew on me over time, and I was soon able to appreciate their beauty regardless.

The sound and music are excellent. Slow, melancholic violins and calm vocalization parts often set the mood without ever distracting your attention.

Despite the nitpicks I listed, this is a strong contender for my personal game of the year, due to the original setting, excellent writing, and the meticulously crafted glyph-based script to decipher. If these three aspects appeal to you, I strongly recommend Heaven's Vault to you. If not, but if you do see a chance that this unique experience might "click" with you, it's still worth a shot (but perhaps buy it on a sale).