Sentimentos mistos definem minha experiência com Heaven's Vault. Teoricamente, ele tem tudo o que gosto. Não, sério, literalmente eu gosto do arcabouço teórico dele.

A narrativa se centra numa disputa do que é a História e seu papel social e cultural. Por um lado, temos os detentores da "História Oficial", que paradoxalmente baseiam sua legitimidade na História ao mesmo tempo em que querem destruí-la como ciência. Para eles a história não é uma investigação do passado; ela é uma justificativa do presente e uma prescrição do futuro. Disputar a "História Oficial" é o mesmo que sedição. Em contrapartida, a protagonista acredita que a História é mais do que uma narrativa fixa. O passado é um repositório armazém de possibilidades não-realizadas, cujo horizonte de expectativas não era simplesmente o tempo presente. Esse armazém não tem um dono: é nosso legado coletivo. Só faltava o nome da protagonista ser Koselleck, sério.

Toda essa teoria é posta em prática de forma razoavelmente bem-sucedida. A mecânica principal de desvendar um sistema de escrita antigo é mais permeado de dúvidas e exige vários palpites e saltos lógicos de sua parte - e isso é bom! Realmente historiadores têm que assumir muitas coisas porque às vezes o passado parece ser agressivamente hostil contra aqueles que tentam desvendá-lo. Se corrigir ao conseguir nova evidência e ver suas hipóteses desmoronando é parte do dia a dia de qualquer cientista, e o jogo simula isso muito bem.

Outra aspecto que o jogo simula muito bem é como muitas vezes pesquisa é algo... Chato. Por mais que você tenha interesse na área, é inegável que catalogar coisas minuciosamente e ver seu progresso andar a passos de tartaruga não é exatamente algo excitante, por mais recompensador que seja no final das contas.

Esse tédio acaba sendo o Calcanhar de Aquiles do jogo. Não acho que o trabalho do historiador deveria ser romantizado, pelo contrário, a inclusão das características menos glamourosas da disciplina foi uma decisão acertada. Mas mesmo outras coisas que não precisam ser tediosas acabam, com o tempo, virando um fardo. O game é ambientado num mundo scifi semi-solarpunk super inspirado em Planeta do Tesouro cheio de ruínas de civilizações antigas e uma diversidade de planetas para explorar. E toda vez que eu entrava nos rios cósmicos ficava com um pouco de sono e invariavelmente pensava "já chegamos?". Não sei vocês, mas na minha cabeça navegar por rios cósmicos descobrindo planetoides de uma civilização perdida não deveria me deixar com essa sensação...

Pra ser justo, no começo fazer isso é realmente legal. Mas o ritmo do game é deveras lento e a variedade de coisas pra fazer pequena demais pra carregar a aventura por mais de 20 horas, que foi o tempo que levei pra zerar. E o game ainda por cima espera que você zere mais uma vez para ter um entendimento mais aprofundado da história? Aí é comprometimento demais pra mim.

Se Heaven's Vault fosse uma aventura mais enxuta, de digamos umas 8 horas, teria potencial para ser um de meus favoritos. Apesar de nossa fama de falastrões, historiadores sabem apreciar o poder de uma boa síntese.

it's shocking how much this game gripped me after leaving such a bad initial impression. the traversal of the game's spaces are cumbersome, the language decoding wasn't as deep as I was hoping, the characters feet fade out into transparency (???), and the protagonist is consistently pretty rude. still, Inkle's narrative design is so compelling that I stuck around until the end, slowly pulling apart the mystery. the world and characters they've built are both deep and unique, and uncovering its past is exciting. looking at the plot more closely, just like in Sorcery! and 80 Days, the player is constantly guiding their protagonist through difficult dilemmas of choice, turning mere fiction (well, deftly written fiction) into a very cerebral activity for the player.

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.

Wonderfully delivers on the concept of playing as an archaeologist uncovering the history and the lost language of the world you're placed in, and unlike most games, Heaven's Vault really does let you explore and uncover history rather than just passively collect logs and notes. An essential difference is that this game will allow you to speculate and be wrong, and put your wrong assumptions on the timeline the same way it would correct ones, and have reactions and unique dialogue prepared for them, which means that you as a player do actually need to pay attention, and amend past mistakes, and cross-reference your knowledge to reach proper conclusions. This is present in both the translation minigame and the general exploration/dialogue portions.

The meat of the gameplay is deciphering an ancient language, and in my view, it's executed wonderfully. There are literally hundreds of samples of text for you to collect and reference, and by the end of the game you are likely to actually be able to read this (actually functional) language and recognize most of the graphemes, which feels incredibly gratifying. The game also provides a few opportunities to flex this knowledge in more... practical applications which serves to further that sense of real accomplishment as well.

The other major part of the game is exploring and talking to people with some (relatively light, depending on how you choose to approach it) investigation elements. Things are more standard in this part with not as many interesting mechanics, but it's worth noting that the writing and the mystery itself are top of the range in terms of what you may generally see in videogames. It's very rare to be able to play a game and say "The writing here is good" without having to add "...for a game". Basically, what I'm saying is that I would still be able to recommend Heaven's Vault even if it were a book.

This recommendation comes with a qualifier that the game DOES still feel about as smooth to play as chewing a bag of nails when you're starting out. The amount of little (and not so little) annoyances during gameplay is immense, and there is so much space for quality-of-life improvements (list of known graphemes for translations, better indication of what your character is about to say on any given generic "remark" or "question" prompt, etc.), and yet the good parts were good enough to win me over, despite me very much being a gameplay-first person. You have to teach yourself to trust this game: trust that it will bring up that one topic you didn't get to explore in a conversation, that it will remember one of your previous actions, that it will give you a chance to correct a mistake in deduction with new information, and so on; and once you get used to this approach, as well as the unconventional dialogue flow, and make peace with inability to manually save and try things out, you're in for a truly unique experience.

Comecei a jogar pela experiência de tradução/descoberta da língua; infelizmente a mecânica de traduzir não é baseada no entendimento e dedução pessoais das palavras, o que foi uma quebra de expectativa muito ruim.

Continuei jogando o jogo mesmo assim por causa da escrita e do worldbuilding, que são muito muito legais mesmo. É ótimo ler esse jogo

Abandonei o jogo porque o gamefeel é infelizmente horrível :'D Não tem efeito sonoro de nada e é tudo muuuuuuitooooo deeeeeeeevaaaagaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrr

Bajo la inestabilidad de este programa se encuentra una de las mejores adaptaciones que he visto de la experiencia arqueológica al videojuego. Con una premisa interesante, un mundo amplio y fascinante, y unos personajes atrayentes y complejos, Heaven's Vault te sumerge en la experiencia de deducción, especulación y, en última instancia, incertidumbre que implica la labor historiográfica. Es posible que esta inestabilidad se sienta como un error de diseño para alguien acostumbrade a la cuidadosa experiencia turistificada de Chants of Sennaar, pero para mí, es ese no saber, ese tener que asumir que tu traducción es correcta y tener que volver a ella una y otra vez para ver si no te has alejado, es la clave de todo. Este juego ofrece un apoyo similar al que Paradise Killer ofrecía con Lady Love Dies y su capacidad de deducción, en el sentido de que Aliya y Six siempre estarán ahí para decirte cuando algo se está traduciendo correctamente. Pero hay una diferencia importante entre servirte de apoyo, y construir un mundo en torno a un lenguaje que acaba sintiéndose demasiado artificial.

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Underneath the jankiness of this program lies one of the best adaptations I've seen of the archaeological experience in a video game. With an interesting premise, a complex and fascinating world, and engaging and complicated characters, Heaven's Vault immerses in a session of deduction, speculation, and the uncertainty that historiographical work entails. It's possible that this instability might feel like a design flaw to someone used to the carefully turistic experience of Chants of Sennaar, but for me, it's that not knowing, that having to assume that your translations are correct, and having to go back to them again to see you haven't wronged too much, is the key to it all. This game offers something similar to what Paradise Killer did with Lady Love Dies and her deductional powers, in that Aliya and Six will always be there to tell you when something is translating correctly. But there's an important difference between supporting you, and building a world around a language that feels way too artificial for its own good.

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!

A bounty of unrealized potential. The high point is that you can really botch conversations with characters and close off possibilities; it's no boot-licking completionist fantasy. But Heaven's Vault should be a 2D point-and-click title – its CG spaces feel unjustified, and your avatar is constantly shifted into auto-travel without warning. The main feature – learning ancient glyphs – is neutered by the hand-holding, multiple-guess system. The game ends with a unsurprising twist that has been in vogue since the Battlestar Galactica remake. You know what would be a daring story? One with ancient non-Lovecraftian gods that turn out to be real.