HEAVEN’S VAULT

How Inkle translated millennia of human history into a unique archaeological adventure

By Malindy Hetfeld

Format PC, PS4, Switch

Developer/publisher Inkle

Origin UK

Release 2019

At the beginning, there was Stargate SG-1. In late 2014, less than half a year from the release of the critically acclaimed 80 Days, Inkle founders Jon Ingold and Joseph Humfrey landed on space archaeology as the theme for their next game, inspired by Stargate and driven by the realisation that this was still unexplored territory for videogames. After initially experimenting with a comic-book presentation that let you move the camera around static panels, the pair knew they wanted players to move through a 3D environment – something new to Inkle games – and talk to characters, but weren’t sure what they’d do in between. And, as it turned out, they weren’t entirely sure what archaeologists did. “Very early on, Joe asked, ‘Well, what are players actually going to do?’” Ingold recalls. “And I said, ‘I don’t know – push levers and buttons, avoid spike traps, that kind of thing. That’s what archaeologists do’. And Joe said: ‘Is it, though?’”

As the team swept aside their pop-cultural preconceptions, they gradually began to excavate a potential structure for the game. “We prototyped a puzzle mechanic around the exploration of old sites,” Ingold says. “We had an idea for a holographic projector that was going to ‘rebuild’ old ruins, because we already had the robot design with the projected head, but we always ran into the problem of ‘so what?’ Once the player has uncovered a space, what do they do with that information? We didn’t feel like there was an endpoint to any of those explorations.”

In the end, it wasn’t Stargate that provided the answer but another piece of archaeologically adjacent pop culture: Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. Specifically, the scene where Indy solves a word puzzle to reach the Holy Grail. This got the team thinking about the connection between archaeology and language. It was the practice of translation, and the thought processes behind it, that fascinated them most. Ingold likens it to teaching people how to read: before you could read a sentence, you had to learn the meaning of individual words. In Heaven’s Vault, you begin with a small set of glyphs, from which you can guess at the meaning of other glyphs. As your vocabulary grows, so does your ability to translate new material from context.