The Banished Vault

[Rob_Haines]

I mentioned The Banished Vault at our meetup last night, and thought I'd go into it in a little more depth here. First off, a thread I wrote on BlueSky to give a sense of the game.

In short, it's a puzzle/strategy game about a small group of monks on a gothic space monastery fleeing a phenomenon know as the Gloom, which is causing all the stars in their wake to go out. Your monks travel between systems in stasis, and each time the Vault arrives in a new system, you have a set number of turns to explore the various planets and moons and gather enough resources to refill your stasis tanks to survive the next hibernation cycle, while not running out of fuel for your ships or falling afoul of various dice-based hazards.

Meanwhile, your monks lose Faith every time they go into cold-sleep, and their ultimate win condition is to build highly-expensive scriptoriums on specific Hallowed planets so they can write new scriptures about their journey. Once enough scriptures have been written, the journey is a success (though I appreciate that you can continue playing after that point).

It's also got a wonderful art style, balanced between monochrome engraving-style splash screens and character art, with a tangible board-game feel to the various maps:

[Rob_Haines]

A lot of the enjoyment I've been getting out of it is making plans and following them through. Your ships have very limited cargo capacity, and fuel efficiency is critical, so you only want to carry enough supplies to achieve your objective and nothing more.

The map makes it clear how much energy you'll need to make specific trips, but then the fuel requirement can differ depending on the size of the ship and the efficiency of the engines (which can be switched out to land on planets with heavier gravity, etc), so you'll end up having to calculate fuel consumption for the various steps of a journey using this delightful slide-rule:

[Rob_Haines]

Jubal also asked how in-depth the monastic theming goes, and in truth, it's mostly visual and mechanical flavour:

- The instruction manual is full of quotes from future scriptures:


- The monks primary stat is Faith, which has to be restored through a period of meditation and consumption of a rare grail-like resource in the Vault.

- The win condition is essentially writing new scripture.

It is a highly-effective flavour, but based on the lack of discussion of the monastic themes in the developer's design diaries I wouldn't be too surprised if that's as deep as it goes.

[Jubal]

Thank you! Those are useful notes

I'm not sure if I'd get super into this game or if it'd be slightly too spreadsheety for my usually rather sleepy brain: I'll have to have a think.