History VideoGame / HeavensVault

''Heaven's Vault'' is an archaeological adventure video game developed and published by indie studio inkle. The game was released for Windows in April 2019.

* {{Teleportation}}: Through the use of "hoppers" in this game, these short-ranged teleporters are often used to visit moons where the ''Nightingale'' can't land. Others were set up to facilitate passage through physical gates that were never meant to be opened the old-fashioned way. [[spoiler:It's eventually revealed that hopper technology doesn't actually seem to have any range restrictions. It's just that nobody knows anymore how to make full use of the few ones that're still active after centuries without maintenance.]]

* LogicBomb: [[spoiler: The robot crew of the ''Heaven's Vault'' are trying to repair the ship by reabsorbing the energy from the rivers. However, doing so will jeopardize the lives of the Nebula's inhabitants, which their Ethical Cores prevent them from doing. As such, they are trapped in a loop, unable to abandon their task or commit to sacrificing the people's lives.]]

** There is another merchang moon you can discover, that was this in the Age of Sail. It's now in ruins.

* MerchantCity: Renaki is a merchant ''planet''. The explorable map consists of two shopping plazas crammed with goods and stalls. The player is able to exchange artifacts for various items here, but there's nothing of substantial value for sale unless you're trying to unlock the gecko-related achievements (or really want an apple).

** Structuring a newly discovered text fragment is often the trickiest part in translating Ancient, especially once longer and longer fragments start showing up. Thankfully, with every wrong attempt on your part, the game removes incorrect words from the available roster to keep you from translating in circles. If you structure the text incorrectly too many times in a row, the game may decide you're having too much trouble and simply file it away for later, with Aliya commenting on how the text is too complex for her to decipher right now.

** Conversely, [[IncrediblyLamePun eagle]]-eyed players might cotton onto this much earlier by noticing that the word for ''vault'' has [[spoiler: a marker indicating that it's a verb]].

* WretchedHive: Pretty much every settled world that isn't Iox is one, but Elboreth is easily the worst of the lot. Six comments on it constantly, which usually garners prickly responses from Elboreth-native Aliya.

* AdventurerArchaeologist: Averted. Aliya dresses sensibly for her job, is physically incapable of the superhuman athletic feats popularized by the trope, makes efforts to treat ruins and artifacts with respect, and is just as much of a scholar as anyone at the University. The whip-and-pistol aspect of the trope is also averted, aside from a single "swordfight" that's [[PlayedForLaughs played for laughs]].

* EvilCripple: Aliya can free a crippled slave named Yazi on Elboreth in return for his help in tracking down Renba's last dig site. Once they get there, [[spoiler:he reveals that he only helped her to rescue another worker Renba abandoned on the moon when he left. While that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, the fact that they attempt to leave Aliya behind in revenge for something she had no hand in squarely puts him into villain territory. Six foils the plan by hoppering itself and Aliya back to the ship before the workers can hijack it, [[KarmicDeath leaving them both to die on the dead moon]].]]
** On the other hand, if you [[spoiler: [[VideoGameCaringPotential elect to go back for the two of them and take them to Renaki]]]], they'll gratefully admit they were wrong about you. Given the way [[spoiler: Renba]] treated them, it's not surprising they'd feel no love for his presumable ally. However, seeing how you [[spoiler:normally can't return to dig sites at all after you left, knowing that going back to get them]] is possible in the first place is a potential case of GuideDangIt, alleviated only by the fact that Six might insist upon doing so and thus tell you that you ''can''.

* GiveMeYourInventoryItem: Of various flavors. You can offer various merchants your hard-earned artifacts in exchange for goods or leads on new sites, which removes the proffered artifacts from your inventory permanently. Showing inscribed artifacts to Huang to check your translations has him ask if you want to hand over the artifact for storage at the University, but he gives you the option to refuse and keep it for yourself.
** In a more plot-relevant variant, if Six watches you discover the Crown of the Empire they'll be obligated to tell Myari about it. From that point on, she'll demand that you give it to her, and she'll hound you for it every time you talk to her if you've lost it [[spoiler: or given it to Oroi for inspection/safekeeping]].

* GhostAmnesia: [[spoiler:Six was once a living person before becoming a robot, and they occasionally remember bits and pieces of their past life as you explore various places that they once frequented]]. What portions of these recollections they share with Aliya are generally either confusing, disturbing, or both.

* LaResistance: A full-scale uprising toppled the Empire back in the day by way of storming Iox and slaughtering nearly everyone there in an event referred to as the Fall. [[spoiler: Myari's belief in the Loop, and subsequent fear of the Fall repeating itself, is the impetus behind Renba's activities and the reason she sends Aliya of all people to pick up his trail when he disappears.]]

* ConLang: The bread and butter of the game, Ancient is a set of over 1,000 glyph-like characters that form an entire, fully functional language that was specifically designed for this game. Initially, Aliya only knows a few simple words, so the first third of the game is basically an exercise in educated guessing until she can confirm the accuracy of her guesses by cross-referencing their use in multiple text fragments. As her dictionary expands, increasingly more complex texts can be translated.

* PointOfNoReturn: [[spoiler:Finding the Aquifer and rerouting the water to the ''Heaven's Vault'']] locks you into the endgame. Unfortunately, there's absolutely no warning given that this will happen, and getting to this point doesn't seem to have any causal connection to its premise of "explore and translate", so for first-time players it tends to come completely out of the blue.

* NewGamePlus: Finishing the story allows you to start a new game with all the Ancient knowledge Aliya had acquired in the first run. It also ups the scope and difficulty of the inscriptions you find. For instance, the very first Ancient text you're given in the game has two words in a standard game and five in NG+.

''Heaven's Vault'' is an archaeological adventure video game developed and published by indie studio Creator/{{inkle}}. The game was released for Windows in April 2019.

* WretchedHive: Pretty much every settled world that isn't Iox is one, but Elboreth is easily the worst of the lot. Six comments on it constantly, which usually garners prickly responses from Elboreth-native Aliya.

* HowTheMightyHaveFallen: Elboreth used to be one of the most important place in the Empire, with Catkis serving as a fortified citadel for the elite. Nowadays, it's a WretchedHive of crime, porverty, and slavery.

''Heaven's Vault'''s most distinctive feature is [[ConLang Ancient]], a meticulously constructed fictional language that is mostly unknown InUniverse when the story begins. It's up to the player to use the few words Aliya knows to discern the meanings of more complex texts they discover on their journey, using logic, intuition and often [[TrialAndErrorGameplay plain guesswork]]. This, coupled with the game's engaging story, quirky characters, unique art style and [[SceneryPorn gorgeous vistas]], garnered ''Heaven's Vault'' rave reviews both before and after launch.

* AfterTheEnd: The Nebula is a broken place littered with the ruins of at least half a dozen lost civilizations. Most had far more advanced technology than the current Ioxian Empire, to the point that present-day characters like Aliya [[LostTechnology can still use some of the old tech without understanding how any of it works]].

** If you were born on Iox, the Ioxian Empire's throne world, don't expect a warm welcome on any of the colonial moons like Elboreth. "Ioxian" is considered a slur in these parts, and the people waste no time blaming Ioxians for every bad thing they can think of. Aliya is not excempt despite being an Elborethian herself - merely relocating to Iox, even if it wasn't your own choice, is grounds enough for discrimination. On the flipside, most high-ranking Ioxians consider Elborethians barely better than the dirt under their feet, so at least the discrimination is mutual.

** Also, nobody seems to like the clearly sentient robots. This is a world that gleefully averts SlaveryIsASpecialKindOfEvil, which should tell you all you need to know about how robots are being treated... and your PlayerCharacter is one of the worst offenders, to boot.

* BrainUploading: One example of LostTechnology in this universe allows the user to create some sort of virtual copy of their consciousness for upload into a special device. The {{Precursors}} that developed this tech used it to store the complete, conscious minds of the deceased for eternity. Strangely, the few people with access to it in the present mostly seem to use it for long-range communication instead, which brings up all sorts of horrifying implications.

* EternalRecurrence: The dominant religion in the Nebula is "the Loop", a belief in the cyclicity of all things. Loopers believe that everything that happens has already happened before countless times, which gives rise to an extremely blasé attitude towards historians and archaelogists like Aliya. Some of the more reasonable Loopers realize that, assuming their beliefs are correct, digging up the distant past offers a direct look at the future, but whether any of this makes sense or has some truth to it is ultimately left ambiguous.

* PricelessPaperweight: Various items you find over the course of the story appear as decor in your ship, but Aliya seems to have interesting ideas on how to store them. The Crown of the Empire, which Aliya describes as the greatest find of her life, can be found unceremoniously hanging on the back of a chair, and the iolite crystal from Maersi spends the rest of the game plunked in a coffee pot once you're done with it. It's also how Timor and Tapi managed to find things of value for you, since a lot of Elborethians don't know the value of what they actually have.

* {{Reincarnation}}: Since Loopers already believe that the universe is basically a BrokenRecord of itself, believing in reincarnation is a fairly natural conclusion. Professor Myari is repeatedly stated to believe that she's a reincarnated empress, but no proof is ever presented neither for her claims nor the existence of reincarnation on the whole. [[spoiler:Especially given that it's more likely for Emperors' mind to be preserved as robots.]]

* TrialAndErrorGameplay: Ancient writing completely lacks spaces, so the first thing you usually need to do upon finding a new inscription is to figure out how many words you're actually dealing with. This is usually done by allocating the words you already know and then hope that it's enough for Aliya to divvy up the fragment into its constituent parts. The nature of Ancient makes this trickier than it sounds because a string of glyphs that you know gains a related but different meaning if there's another glyph in front of or behind it, and if you haven't "discovered" this word somewhere else before, you can't place it. Fortunately, [[AntiFrustrationFeature the game automatically crosses out incorrect words]] in your roster every time Aliya realizes that she/you got it wrong, so assuming you have enough correct words left in the end, the true structure of the text fragment eventually reveals itself if you're sufficiently tenacious.