Heaven’s Vault is a great game with a good story, interesting world building and beautiful music, the execution is a bit clunky though. The good news is it seems a new addition to this universe is in development!

If anything I’d say Heaven’s Vault is the better of the two!

Sure, it’s way less polished and can be janky, but the language and the translation mechanics are so much deeper and more well-developed than anything in Chants of Sennaar.

The languages in Chants are tightly defined and very specific to what the game needed, so they’re not really usable outside of that context. But the language in HV is rich and complex, and you can actually learn to write new things in it.

i knew what it was before clicking, and i have to say - as someone who thought that game would be perfect for me i was very disappointed

in the interest of not wanting to influence people’s opinions by being the only and negative comment i’ll spoiler my criticism, i still encourage folks to try it, and you can always refund it

spoiler

disappointed mostly by how janky it felt and how unintuitive a lot of the UI was. NPCs would speak too fast, give no time to pick the choice you want, in conversation other npcs approach you and start talking, my hand was held constantly, i got so many bugs and just, it felt like a pre-release build of a game i’d love if it was fixed, but no that was it- i don’t refund a lot of games but i came in expecting a great experience and the entire time i felt deep frustration

I loved the gameplay and puzzles for the most part (and the adorable main char) but I don’t have enough brain juice to figure out the language D:

I didn’t try to figure out the language in this game, but exploring, finding hidden areas, and secrets was so satisfying I need another game like this too. I love when puzzles are knowledge-gated rather than item- or progress-gated.

I would argue that that’s the optional game mechanic.

The main game mechanic is that it’s a Zelda like hack and slash. The secondary game mechanic is its secret puzzle system and then finally if you get through all that, there’s still this language you can decipher to solve the very last puzzle.