80 Days devs Inkle have opened Heaven's Vault

Sail the rivers between moons and planets, explore ancient ruins and bustling towns alike, and learn a lost ancient language in Heaven's Vault, out now. The sci-fi archaeology adventure is the latest game from Inkle, the studio behind the excellent 80 Days, and that's enough to make me buy it. Hold on a sec.

Okay, done. For realsies. Lovely.

Alice Bee is currently writing down Wot She Thinks of Heaven's Vault to inform us all sssssoon but, for now, here's word that it is out.

Right so, we're space archaeologist Aliya who, with the help of her robopal, is unearthing the secrets of an ancient civilisation across a nebula where a river flows between worlds. As well as exploring, she's learning their language. Inkle have created a fictional language with over a thousand words to find, as Brendy has detailed before, and we'll try to figure it out. It's very much not Duolingo, as Aliya will have to intuit the meaning of glyphs from context, from knowledge, from... guesswork, often. The more she learns, the more understands the past and revises her understanding of the language and the civilisation's history.

Which sounds grand to me.

Alice is working on that there review, as I mentioned, but in the meantime you can read her recent preview for more.

Heaven's Vault is out now on Steam. A 15% launch discount brings it down to £16.99/€18.69/$21.24 until Tuesday the 23rd.

Our Matthew chatted with Heaven's Vault narrative director Jon Ingold during EGX Rezzed earlier this month, showing off a little exploration and the vast, vast timeline of history:

Ingold also gave a Rezzed talk about creating a fictional language: