It’s hard to say whether I like this game or not. It has two of my favorite things: linguistics and archaeology. Indeed, for the first three hours, I had great fun playing this game. However, soon, I lost interest. The movement was slow, travelling was tedious and the music put me to sleep. And then, unbelievably, after another three hours, I started to love this game again. What’s more surprising is that the reason that I lost interest and the reason that I liked this game are essentially the same. That’s the nonlinear narrative of this game.
The protagonist is an archaeologist who needs to find the missing roboticist, Janniqi Renba. On her way, she has to collect inscriptions and guess the meaning of ancient words so that she can understand the language. Soon, she finds out all thread leads to some place called Heaven’s Vault. Though the story sounds interesting and I admit that it’s really hard to build a whole new world with such a complicated system from scratch, I still think it’s a pity that, compared to the settings, the story lacks depth.
This game is very nonlinear. As long as you can collect enough evidence, the order doesn’t matter. This offers players a lot of choices but it can also be a shortness. If there are too many pieces of a puzzle, player won’t know where to start with and how the story proceeds at the beginning. That’s why I felt bored after the first three hours. Some might just give up here, but I kept playing the game and endured the boredom and finally, after Oroi was missing, this game interested me again. There are no serious punishments. You won’t really die, you don’t have to make a lot of money and of course, it’s not an exciting journey like Lara Croft’s. The only thing you need to do is studying ancient language and figure out what the words mean. The game is slow while the story is quite fast. The puzzles are almost the same while each puzzle conveys different messages. It’s a game that creates a mood like no other modern video game, probably because that’s what history does. It’s not something that you can create or change but waits to be discovered. However, my expectation was probably too high and I hoped the story could well express a feeling of hollowness and thickness, but it just ended after I saved Nebula.
Overall, despite some shortness, I like this game very much.
Commentaires