Exciting news from Cambridge-based inkle, who are creating Heaven’s Vault, a game where you uncover a lost past and decipher a lost language. It’s a great adventure game, featuring archaeologist Aliya Elasra and Six, her wheeled, semi-humanoid robot assistant. Aliya and Six explore The Nebula, an ancient network of scattered moons, finding cities and buildings from a lost civilisation in their travels.
Engraved on these monuments are inscriptions from a lost language, made up of hieroglyphics, similar to ancient Egyptian. Like Champollion deciphering Egyptian glyphs, Aliya starts to translate these inscriptions with your help, in order to learn about The Nebula’s past.
You can approach the story in any order as the game is designed to work whatever path you take. It remembers your translation choices and adapts the action to your choices. The language has around 1,000 words, and is logically constructed, meaning that each symbol has a meaning, and that meaning is always the same.
The translation aspects of the story are engaging, as you are never quite sure if your guesses at the meaning are correct. Every inscription you find has a meaning, and as you gather more information about the language, and more glyphs, you can change your translations. This alters Aliya’s understanding of her findings.
So if you fancy trying your skills as a translator, this sounds like a really fun game to try. The team at Accutranslate will keep an eye on its release and try it out later in the year. In the meantime, if you need translation of a current language, however obscure, contact us to have it deciphered! 0800 466 1335 or info@laacademia.co.uk