This review contains spoilers
This is an immensely cool concept that only barely manages to rise above the janky and frustrating gameplay it's behind. I'll save actually listing all of my complains for the end of the review so that you don't have to scroll past it, but for now suffice to say that the game is extremely slow and tedious, you're constantly being interrupted and having to wait. It was bad enough that I couldn't bear repeating it for a second playthrough, even though I was excited by the prospect of a New Game+ with deeper puzzles.
Visually, the game's artstyle looks unique and great in stills, but in motion, in gameplay, I found it very jarring, with the minimal animations, leaving behind inexplicable specters as you walk, and awkward camera issues as the game tries to dynamically make a cutscene out of wherever you're standing.
So then, the concept that redeems all this. Even with the shallow nature of the conlang, and the puzzles often being more about guessing what words make sense rather than interpreting the glyphs, it was still a fun, satisfying mechanic, and I was always motivated to push through the tedium of the rest of the game in the hopes of getting to more inscriptions. The setting and history are really engaging too, especially with the way you uncover it being a fundamental part of the game's flow.
I was also impressed with how dynamic and open the game seemed, with you able to learn new information in radically different orders, and in conversation Aliya's dialogue will reflect that.
As far as the actual plot goes though - Iiiii dunno. The secret hyperadvanced precursor society - if you can call it a society - is a pretty played-out trope, and the focus on the entropy of the universe kind of undermines the importance of looking at history and learning the language. Unless I missed it, you don't even get offered the chance to translate the huge amounts of ancient script in the Vault. Nothing you learned matters, because everything is doomed and you need to either leave it all behind or (I assume) die for your principles if you refuse to. In general, the last minute ending split tends to be a red flag.
I do love the "Vault" wordplay - secrets hiding in plain sight on the cover and all that - but the very fact it's wordplay relies on the shallowness of the conlang. Why would "safe-underground-place" and "travel-high-far-fast" be the same word in such an ideographic language?
Right: Time to whine. Each of these complaints is individually minor, but they add up to a tedious, frustrating experience. It's a mix of small one-time things and game-spanning quibbles that never go away.
As already mentioned, the game's visual style is pretty strange in motion.
The dialogue system is really slowly paced, unvoiced, and doesn't have the best contrast against the background. Lines appear one-by-one far slower than I'd like, with no option I could find to bring up the next line early. Voiced lines are extremely rare, and don't always seem important enough to get that distinction, compared to the conversations that go unvoiced.
Aliya is... kind of a dick, sometimes to an unwarranted degree, and sometimes you don't really have any good choices, or you don't realise a choice will go where it does. I like to try to be nice! This does have the upside of making Aliya a distinct character, but the amount of game you spend choosing responses feels at odds.
The game doesn't seem to like alt-tabbing very much.
I'm not sure if it was a related issue or just intentional design, but when I played the game, a lot of it was almost silent. Not just the lack of dialogue, but few-to-no music or sound effects. It was eerie, and not in situations where it would be intentionally so.
The game likes to take control away from you to walk down stairs or through doorways and such. This increases the feeling that you spend a lot of time waiting, without player agency. Additionally, if you're in the middle of a conversation, which can usually play out while you walk, you'll stop dead in your tracks until it plays out in full, including any responses.
Six bugs you to return to the ship almost every time you cross a threshold once you've cleared one plot flag on a moon, even if you're trying to walk directly another one.
I don't know that there's much benefit to doing so anyway, but does Huang have to walk away slowly with each individual artefact I give him when he knows I have five more?
Like I said, I have some mechanical gripes with the translation mechanic. When you're trying to define word boundaries, I couldn't figure out a way to make the game try it even if I knew everything left I could add was wrong. And every time you do get it wrong, often being just forced to, you have to sit through Aliya or Six chiming in with the slow dialogue system, then all of your progress is discarded and you have to place it all back again.
Also, I wanted to be able to search inscriptions by words. If a definition is rejected and I need to choose a new one, I want to be able to see the context I previously defined it in, and if the definition of a word updates, I want to review other inscriptions it was in, even if it's not all locked in yet.
When sailing, the slow dialogue system will sometimes make you miss turns. They could have taken more care to keep those lines shorter so that the important thing is always in the first message.
Visually, the game's artstyle looks unique and great in stills, but in motion, in gameplay, I found it very jarring, with the minimal animations, leaving behind inexplicable specters as you walk, and awkward camera issues as the game tries to dynamically make a cutscene out of wherever you're standing.
So then, the concept that redeems all this. Even with the shallow nature of the conlang, and the puzzles often being more about guessing what words make sense rather than interpreting the glyphs, it was still a fun, satisfying mechanic, and I was always motivated to push through the tedium of the rest of the game in the hopes of getting to more inscriptions. The setting and history are really engaging too, especially with the way you uncover it being a fundamental part of the game's flow.
I was also impressed with how dynamic and open the game seemed, with you able to learn new information in radically different orders, and in conversation Aliya's dialogue will reflect that.
As far as the actual plot goes though - Iiiii dunno. The secret hyperadvanced precursor society - if you can call it a society - is a pretty played-out trope, and the focus on the entropy of the universe kind of undermines the importance of looking at history and learning the language. Unless I missed it, you don't even get offered the chance to translate the huge amounts of ancient script in the Vault. Nothing you learned matters, because everything is doomed and you need to either leave it all behind or (I assume) die for your principles if you refuse to. In general, the last minute ending split tends to be a red flag.
I do love the "Vault" wordplay - secrets hiding in plain sight on the cover and all that - but the very fact it's wordplay relies on the shallowness of the conlang. Why would "safe-underground-place" and "travel-high-far-fast" be the same word in such an ideographic language?
Right: Time to whine. Each of these complaints is individually minor, but they add up to a tedious, frustrating experience. It's a mix of small one-time things and game-spanning quibbles that never go away.
As already mentioned, the game's visual style is pretty strange in motion.
The dialogue system is really slowly paced, unvoiced, and doesn't have the best contrast against the background. Lines appear one-by-one far slower than I'd like, with no option I could find to bring up the next line early. Voiced lines are extremely rare, and don't always seem important enough to get that distinction, compared to the conversations that go unvoiced.
Aliya is... kind of a dick, sometimes to an unwarranted degree, and sometimes you don't really have any good choices, or you don't realise a choice will go where it does. I like to try to be nice! This does have the upside of making Aliya a distinct character, but the amount of game you spend choosing responses feels at odds.
The game doesn't seem to like alt-tabbing very much.
I'm not sure if it was a related issue or just intentional design, but when I played the game, a lot of it was almost silent. Not just the lack of dialogue, but few-to-no music or sound effects. It was eerie, and not in situations where it would be intentionally so.
The game likes to take control away from you to walk down stairs or through doorways and such. This increases the feeling that you spend a lot of time waiting, without player agency. Additionally, if you're in the middle of a conversation, which can usually play out while you walk, you'll stop dead in your tracks until it plays out in full, including any responses.
Six bugs you to return to the ship almost every time you cross a threshold once you've cleared one plot flag on a moon, even if you're trying to walk directly another one.
I don't know that there's much benefit to doing so anyway, but does Huang have to walk away slowly with each individual artefact I give him when he knows I have five more?
Like I said, I have some mechanical gripes with the translation mechanic. When you're trying to define word boundaries, I couldn't figure out a way to make the game try it even if I knew everything left I could add was wrong. And every time you do get it wrong, often being just forced to, you have to sit through Aliya or Six chiming in with the slow dialogue system, then all of your progress is discarded and you have to place it all back again.
Also, I wanted to be able to search inscriptions by words. If a definition is rejected and I need to choose a new one, I want to be able to see the context I previously defined it in, and if the definition of a word updates, I want to review other inscriptions it was in, even if it's not all locked in yet.
When sailing, the slow dialogue system will sometimes make you miss turns. They could have taken more care to keep those lines shorter so that the important thing is always in the first message.