Heaven’s Vault, a science fiction adventure told with the appealing restraint of an Asimov classic, begins as something of a reluctant manhunt. Your character, Aliya, an orphan who as a young girl was rescued from a planet of slave traders by an esteemed academic, is summoned home to the university where she grew up. There, her adoptive mother beseeches Aliya to find an old friend who has disappeared while undertaking an archaeological treasure hunt. It’s an interruption that Aliya, a freelance archaeologist-cum-treasure hunter herself, could do without. Still, through familial loyalty, or more likely a rivalrous interest in whatever treasure the vanished man was hunting, she glumly agrees to the assignment.

So begins a winding but exhilarating galactic sojourn – one that differs from linear fiction in that it remembers and adapts to every choice and every path you follow in order to build a story acutely individual to the player. The choose-your-own adventure is in vogue thanks, in part, to Charlie Brooker’s recent Netflix experiment Bandersnatch. Heaven’s Vault is, however, a different class of work, deeply complex and textured and building upon its Cambridge-based studio Inkle’s Bafta-winning previous game, 80 Days. The result is an elegiac triumph, filled with the kind of sturdy writing and character development that remains rare – all the more thrilling considering the story’s adaptive quality.

This is not the science fiction of Kubrick. Aliya, who appears to be of, in Earthly terms, Middle Eastern descent, wears a headscarf and well-ventilated cotton trousers. Her ship is no gleaming rocket, but more like a relic of the Spanish Armada, with billowing sails, creaking beams, and a cat’s cradle of rigging. To move between the moons and planets where Aliya conducts her scrabbling search, you must steer this vessel, the Nightingale, along shimmering rivers of photons, tributaries that act as lines to link the drama. Then when you land, after these palate-cleansing dashes, the business of exploration and interrogation begins, as you approach the locals, follow leads and search for clues in the environment.

By directing Aliya’s responses in conversation, choosing from a few dialogue options, you can specify her mood. Guided by your invisible hand, she can be brusque, confrontational or tactful, and the way in which you respond to the people she meets will routinely open up or close off entire chambers of discussion, some of which contain valuable investigative leads. In this way, the smallest choices have story-defining consequences. Still, Aliya, the character, and you, the player, are not quite one and the same. You may have the power to direct Aliya’s interactions, but not her essential character (that which has made her frame lithe, her mind intrepid, and that has drawn her into her vocation). You may only, for example, dull or sharpen her dislike of robots, not alter it altogether.

This distinction between character and player is emphasised in the game’s puzzle work: deciphering the universe’s ancient hieroglyphic language. Snippets of this forgotten text are scrawled everywhere: on pots, graves, jewellery and hearths. Each time you discover a new phrase etched into the world and its artefacts, Aliya presents you with three potential translations for each individual word. The language, which has been developed for the game, melds the pictorial scripts of Chinese and Egyptian writing systems with the atomic elements that build Germanic words. So, the glyph for “fire” will be similar to but distinct from the glyph for “water”. The result is a game of informed guesswork, as you study words in order to derive meaning.

Context is useful: certain words would never appear in a phrase chipped into a gravestone. And so is likeness: once you have the word for “goddess”, it’s easier to settle on the word for “temple”. When she has seen a glyph enough times, Aliya will confirm or deny your guess, giving the game the encouraging ambience of academic collaboration.

What is striking is how much power the game’s designers give you to mess everything up. A wrongly chosen translation can send you off down avenues for hours before you realise they are dead ends. Likewise, your robot companion – whose rule-abiding AI routines clash with Aliyah’s risk-taking temperament – will often ask whether you want to leave a scene long before you have uncovered all of its treasures. The opportunity to make mistakes heightens your sense of accomplishment when you do happen to successfully translate a phrase, or find some crucial clue at the 11th hour. The result is a game of quietly forceful consequence. There are few flashy effects here, or action set pieces, but the way in which Heaven’s Vault builds its sense of meaning and magnitude will stay with you far longer than the latest apocalyptic zombie-popper.



Also recommended

‘Impressive’: Falcon Age.

Falcon Age

(Outerloop Games, PS4)

Another adventure that takes place on a wind-whipped desert planet. In Falcon Age, you nurture an orphan bird of prey to become your feathered companion and primary weapon, to be used against a force of robot colonisers. The game, which can be played in both standard and virtual reality modes, explores what is lost when a civilisation pursues technology at the expense of tradition. The bird, perched on your finger, is the star of the enterprise, ducking and preening in delightfully lifelike ways before you sent it off to attack a drone, or hunt a rabbit. The sense of dismay when your charge is wounded (you must pluck the arrows from its tiny torso) is keen; an impressive feat for a small studio.