Heavenâs Vault is an interesting-looking symbol-deciphering game thatâs apparently âlike Guitar Hero for linguistics.â From a review in The Verge:
Initially, the premise for Heavenâs Vault sounds like a typical video game. You play as a young woman named Aliya Elasra, accompanied by her temperamental robot Six, and together you explore a series of moons that were once home to a mysterious ancient civilization. But the ruins arenât filled with violent aliens to kill or powerful weapons to discover. Instead, what the civilization left behind is words, and itâs your job to figure out what they mean. [âŚ]
The first time you see a hieroglyph, you essentially have to guess what it is. The game will show you a pictorial, and then give you a few options for what it might mean. A symbol could mean either âtempleâ or âgarden,â and, initially, all you have to go on is the context of where the symbol is and what it looks like. If you guess wrong, you arenât punished. In fact, the game lets you carry on thinking that could be the meaning of the word. As you explore, youâll keep seeing symbols repeatedly and learn new ones that can give you a better idea of what others mean.
Eventually, if youâve guessed wrong, Aliya will realize that it isnât right, and the definition will be reset. By that time, you may have worked out what it really means by discovering other hieroglyphs or by learning something new about your location. Itâs a system designed specifically to make you feel unsure and thus more like a real archaeologist. The gameâs creators want you to fumble around. âWe deliberately delay that process a little bit so that it goes on for slightly longer than you might be comfortable with because that feeling of not quite being sure is important,â says Inkle co-founder Jon Ingold.
The language itself has around 1,000 words, and the team describes it as being âlogically constructed.â The idea is that the symbols arenât random; each has a meaning, and that meaning is always the same. [âŚ]
While the language itself is real, the team admits that, in order to make it work for the purposes of the game, itâs not exactly the most functional language. âItâs complete in the sense that itâs fully logical, but itâs also not a super useful language,â Humfrey explains. âWe have around 1,000 words, which is just enough to be useful for the purposes of the game.â He likens it to Guitar Hero for linguists: itâs enough to make you feel like youâre doing the job, but it cuts out a lot of the more tedious busy work.Â
Read the rest of the review.
This game reminds me of the symbol-deciphering puzzles in the Linguistics Olympiad â I hope it leads people into wanting to learn more about linguistics!Â















