Aliya Elasra is an archaeologist, exploring a strange region of space called the Nebula with her robot sidekick Six, hoping to uncover the secrets of the long-forgotten past. When a roboticist from the University of Iox goes missing, Aliya begins a trail of discoveries that will lead to the very edge of her world - and the ancient secret of Heaven's Vault.
What an incredible gem!
For me, this was a "detective" game; for those curious, the game is mainly composed of 4 "activities", well depicted in the trailers:
(1) Navigating a nebula to find important locations (and small ruins);
(2) Walking around such locations looking for ancient objects;
(3) Finding inscriptions with an ancient language (often on objects), that you are trying to decipher.
(4) Once in a while, you find people you can converse with.
The systems tie up to each other nicely -- each time you find an object, you get clues that narrow down the search areas for new locations. Once in a while the game throws a very light "object based" puzzle, but these are rare and very easy (you do not have to actually handle an inventory or anything like that). Conversations adapt very fluidly based on what you have discovered, so characters feel more real than most NPCs you see in games (pretty much no repeated lines from conversations).
Most of the time you are doing the "walking around", which could be very boring, but in a very smart developer choice, you can chat away with a companion as you walk. These conversations are very well written and help you figure out this world and the two main characters. Actually, the whole game is superbly written (which I expected, since this was the main strength of "80 Days", from the same developers).
This game has a very unique and pleasant graphic style, and the navigating sections are gorgeous to look at. It helps that the soundtrack is also beautiful (I am a sucker for violins), often mysterious, often relaxing. The world feels history-rich and fascinating, but it is presented fluidly through natural talking, no huge expositions.
Now, the game will not be for everyone. The gameplay isn't really very "active", and the rewards are mostly learning the story and the history of this world. Even achievements only showed up for me when I closed the game -- maybe developers did not want to interrupt the immersion with popup windows?
Finally, the ancient language is great -- you learn it slowly, word by word, fragment by fragment, and it makes total sense if you know a little grammar. The game knows how to gently nudge you in the right direction, but you still have the illusion that you learned the whole thing on your own. I was often guessing the meaning of phrases before the game even showed me the options for the puzzle.
If I have to mention a negative: while I can accept the ending I got on my first playthrough as something that made sense and fit the story, its presentation was horrible. The game feels very epic, so the ending demands more than a few lines of dialogue dumping me to credits -- give me an actual epilogue, tell me what happened to other characters, show me some fireworks... That said, I enjoyed the game so much I am doing a 2nd playthrough now, trying to act differently to see what changes (and, so far, many things did change, including the phrases I am deciphering!).
Score so far: 94/100 (and it could be more if the ending were not so anticlimatic!)
Edit: done with 2nd playthrough; amazing how the game adapts to many choices! That said, the other 2 endings I found were also presented a bit too swiftly. 93/100 (as if anybody cared! :D) and we are done! :D