Regardless of how I feel about the game’s overall funky mechanics and technical quirks at times, Heaven’s Vault deserves credit for putting effort into building a bit of a different world that you’ll need to endeavor to explore and understand. That does absolutely make it interesting and pretty unique. The problem for me is that in so many situations it felt like I was watching or playing a sequel, or hit the game somewhere in the second act. Without understanding my character’s motivations or anything about the reasons behind her attitude towards robots and other characters being prompted to complete her dialogue simply felt strange. You are able to understand more about her and some other characters as you go, but by then you’ve already made decisions which you’d hope wouldn’t negatively impact the outcome of the story just because you didn’t have enough context at the time. Trying to translate symbols falls into the same space, where you’re asked to interpret things but have no basis to work from initially, it’s just a bit odd. Throw in inconsistent pacing and just some technical weirdness at times and it’s an attractive and different sort of package but you can’t help but be baffled by some of its missteps.