It’s an incredible achievement in interactive storytelling, made better by its faith that players will want to undertake such a daunting task. By the time you’ve finished, the past, present, and future all bear your fingerprints, traces of where you’ve gone and what you bothered to learn. Studio co-founder Jon Ingold once told me their design approach is “Lots of little choices, all of which can be significant at any given moment.” Heaven’s Vault demonstrates that better than ever, even better than Sorcery! and 80 Days. An ancient graveyard or simple garden? Religious artifact or junk? The choice is yours. Get a translation wrong, it might affect the way your character sees the entire story going forward. Heaven’s Vault is loathe to give straight answers to even its simplest mysteries, instead communicating through crumbling mosaics and inscriptions on weathered walls and in chunks of wood washed up on riverbanks.Īnd everywhere, remnants of a lost language, glyphs the player needs to translate either through context or guesswork. But it’s a functional history, a knot the player needs to unravel.
It’s a game about history-a fictional history, of a lost galactic empire and what caused its downfall. Of all the games on this list, I think Heaven’s Vault ($25 on Steam) asks the most of its audience. Here’s hoping Capcom can repeat the trick with the Resident Evil 3 remake in 2020. It’s a small tweak, but indicates both how technology’s evolved since 1998 and how discussions around difficulty have evolved.įor a series this old to reinvent itself? To scrape off some of the accumulated cruft? That’s incredible. One of my favorite changes is also one brand-new to the series: A map that changes color depending on whether you’ve finished searching a room or not.
Resident Evil 2 ($60 on Humble) is a fully modern game, representing two decades of progress-in mechanics, in storytelling, in level design, in every discipline imaginable. But it rises above nostalgia in a way few remakes ever manage. I’d played past Resident Evils, but none ever hooked me like this year’s remake.Ĭapcom preserved the spirit of the 1998 original, and even preserved some of the more iconic setpieces and puzzles from Claire and Leon’s respective adventures. “ Resident Evil 2 is the Resident Evil that finally made me a fan.” I looked back at our write-up in June and I can’t think of a better way to put it, nor a better endorsement.
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