Zilnad wrote:kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:Started Heavens Vault on Switch last night. I enjoy all of Inkle's work, and this is not looking like any exception. The depth of choice hinted at in the first couple of hours is a bit mind blowing.
Performance on Switch is a bit iffy. I picked it up on this format for the physical edition, but perhaps it would fair better on one of the other platforms. Nothing game breaking though.
I find your taste in games really aligns with my own and this is another game that I have in my library and need to start!
Looking forward to hearing more about it.
So a little update after about 5 hours...
The game is massively ambitious with the branching (or at least "non linear") story it is trying to tell. And it just seems to work. I have rarely (if ever) encountered the non sequiturs you would sometimes see in 80 Days (specifically when asking people about routes to certain places and they would reply "I don't know but there is an X in Y that does Z"). Here there just seems to be endless amounts of potential relevant dialogue, and that doesn't stop being impressive.
The budget limitations really do show. Despite the art being really nice and unique, there is a lot of glitchy environments and the most frustrating bug is that voice bubble things can move aorund mid conversation, which can make it hard to actually stay focused on the narrative. This is alleviated to some extent by all conversation being quite punchy (no more than a few lines between the next choice you have to make), so it never feels like you are reading a wall of text.
Though only partly narrated, the VA for your character is brilliant and has a really lovely voice (subjective I know).
The "sailing" scenes are pretty awful, adding nothing and going on for far too long. I assume they are to give a sense of expansiveness and pacing, but they can go on for way too long as the game progresses, and are barely interactive.
The language solving puzzles remain mind blowing to me. You make educated guess as to what the symbol might mean, and it gives you "linked" glyphs based on what choices you have made for other words previously. Every now and then it will categorically tell you if some are right (or wrong), but it feels like you can make a lot of selections around on a theory you have based on a symbol you saw some time ago.
It's all very impressive and there is not a lot out there like it. The game moves at a very slow pace, but I don't think that is to it's detriment.