A collection aside
HEAVEN’S VAULT
“The game will often tell you when a guess is correct, while also allowing you to make, and link together, gigantic mistakes.”
DEVELOPER INKLE LTD • PRICE $36 https://www.inklestudios.com/heavensvault/
I love stories involving a person (and their robot) wandering the desert. Blame independent American film, Everything Beautiful is Far Away, perhaps. There’s just something so dissonant about machines on sand, as if there should be an explanation for why this unlikely context has arisen, yet you can’t quite grasp it. Heaven’s Vault is not set in an ordinary desert, either. Aliya Elasra and her unlikely companion, Six, visit a Nebula’s arid “moons”, via a network of “rivers” made of hydrogen, oxygen and other gases. Incredible, right?
Moreover, you’re an archaeologist, but for a university of cultists who believe that time is a loop, so you’re also (if they’re correct) unearthing the future. Six has been chipped from a “wall on the lower levels”, its memory erased. A researcher from the university has gone missing. A girl, on a far-flung moon believes that traversing rivers makes you wicked and impure. Many doors aren’t designed to open, they’re symbolic places to teleport from. There are goddesses, communities, wellsprings, gardens, mines and much more, to explore.
The setting is clearly amazing, so how do the mechanics fare? Dialogue works
