One More Go

The last time on The more You Know we discussed how The Witness empowers you to solve its puzzles by teaching you to understand its visual language. This time we’re going to be digging into Heaven’s Vault, a game that asks you to learn an actual language, albeit a fictional one, as you piece together the history of an ancient civilization.

In Heaven’s Vault you play as Aliya, an archeologist from the planet Iox, who alongside her robotic companion Six has been tasked with tracking down a missing roboticist. Aliya’s search pulls her across a nebula of loosely connected moons, each with ruins, artefacts, and most importantly, inscriptions to translate. Deciphering these snippets of information will give you a greater context and understanding of the nebula, and its lost civilization, the Ancients.

Aliya’s journey begins when she is handed a brooch inscribed with mysterious symbols, and you as the player must translate them. Sometimes, especially in the first few instances, you’ll mostly be guessing at what the symbols could mean just by how they look – maybe those vertical lines do kind of look like light? Could those squiggles mean water? You don’t get instant feedback on whether you’ve guessed correctly, instead, your left to continue guessing as you discover more messages, collecting building blocks of symbols that make up a dictionary of words. As you encounter more and more phrases, eventually you’ll see the same symbols repeated along with your initial assumption, if they clearly no longer fit, Aliya will call out that it must be wrong, and you can take another guess. Otherwise, Aliya might confirm that your guess was correct, and you’ll be able to use those symbols to support more complicated translations further into your adventure, or better yet, they might reveal some hidden truth that will propel your adventure further forward.

Heaven’s vault was developed by Inkle Studios, of 80 Days and Sorcery! fame, and there is plenty of that shared DNA to be found here. As with all Inkle games there’s a complex network of branching narratives that will impact how the story unfolds, but unlike those other games Heaven’s Vault is much more open ended, allowing you to visit different ruins and locations as you see fit. Heaven’s Vault is also the first Inkle game that is fully rendered in 3D, and for good reason. Not only does it allow for the world’s beautiful painterly art style, but as in The Witness, puzzles and solutions aren’t limited just to static screens, and you may need to consider the context of where a phrase has been carved in order to accurately deduce its meaning. An inscription on a ceremonial token will likely be spiritual in nature, whereas a gift may have messages of affection carved upon it. There are clues everywhere, and you’re rewarded for considering the space they’re found and not just the symbols themselves.

If at any point you need some help making sense of what you’ve excavated, you can always return to the University on Iox, where you can share your finds and discoveries with Huang, a fellow academic. As part of the trade he’ll offer you similar phrases that can help confirm some of your guesses, break up complex words, or in some cases offer up entirely new words. You can choose to donate items to Huang if you want them to be stored in the archives, though giving up items on Iox means you won’t be able to trade them for information or goods elsewhere. Not all the choices you make have a direct impact on the narrative, but they each play a part in defining your version of Aliya and her relationship with the characters and the world around her.

Each new discovery, whether a conversation that uncovers new information, a new item, or a recently translated glyph, are all added to the world’s interactive timeline. Capturing the discovery itself, but also noting its place in the wider context of the world’s history, expanding the timeline in both directions at once. The timeline runs from your most recent actions, through Aliya’s life before the game began, to hundreds of years in the past. Not unlike piecing together a full language glyph by glyph, the history of the Ancients is uncovered one discovery at a time, until you’re finally ready to proceed to the game’s conclusion.

As with the other games we’ll be discussing throughout The More You Know the knowledge you uncover is the true mark of progression in Heaven’s Vault, and will allow you to not only fly through future replays, but the locations you visit and the items you find will be re-contextualised by your discoveries, offering ample reason to dive back in and play through the story again.