Bio
Will never beat her backlog now that Game Pass exists
Personal Ratings
1★
5★

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Elite Gamer

Played 500+ games

GOTY '23

Participated in the 2023 Game of the Year Event

1 Years of Service

Being part of the Backloggd community for 1 year

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Gained 3+ followers

Gamer

Played 250+ games

GOTY '22

Participated in the 2022 Game of the Year Event

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Journaled games once a day for a week straight

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Played 100+ games

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Voted for at least 3 features on the roadmap

Favorite Games

Mass Effect
Mass Effect
Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
Baldur's Gate 3
Baldur's Gate 3
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
Xenoblade Chronicles
Xenoblade Chronicles

506

Total Games Played

005

Played in 2024

427

Games Backloggd


Recently Played See More

Baldur's Gate 3
Baldur's Gate 3

Mar 04

Venba
Venba

Mar 04

Maquette
Maquette

Feb 23

Alan Wake II
Alan Wake II

Feb 12

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

Feb 05

Recently Reviewed See More

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!

The way I was cursing at this game would make anyone (including me) question why I still rank Sifu so high, but the way the game rewards players’ persistence is just masterful. Rarely have I felt so good after beating a game.

I love the first Moss and Moss: Book 2 did not disappoint. The game made some much needed gameplay improvements but most of all I enjoyed just being present in tiny Quill’s world again.