Like the beginnings of the universe, The Banished Vault starts out impossibly dense, before expanding outwards into something brilliant. On first glance it’s almost inscrutable – but it’s also tantalisingly simple. You, a crew of maybe half a dozen intergalactic monks, stranded at the frontiers of galactic exploration, have encountered something called The Gloom, a virus of darkness consuming one solar system at a time. Guided by little more than a glorified abacus and your wavering faith, you must outrun it for long enough to chronicle the mysteries you find here at the edge of existence, holding out against the rushing darkness to transmit your findings back home. You arrive somewhere. You research something. You move on in time to survive – manage that four times and you’re done. When it all clicks, and the fog of numbers and tables and energy calculators clears, it’s magic.
The Banished Vault reviewDeveloper: Lunar DivisionPublisher: Bithell GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam)
But first: the density. The Banished Vault is consciously designed as a kind of virtual board game. The universe is rendered flat here, your ships moving like pieces on a board, the board itself a generated map of a solar system, with several planets and their moons around a central star. At the start of each run, and each trip to a new system within it, The Auriga Vault, a vast galactic monastery and your suitably gothic, 40K-inspired home among the stars, arrives and waits at the edge of this solar system, while your three starting ships and six starting monks – called Exiles here – arrive with it.
To get to the next solar system safely, you’ll need to gather enough resources and construct the right buildings on the available planetary surfaces to create something called Stasis, which your Exiles need to survive the deep hibernation between jumps to new systems. That’s mere survival, though. To achieve your real goal you’ll need to reach a hallowed planet, typically the one closest to a system’s sun (and therefore furthest from the safety of the Vault), land there, and construct a Scriptorum, for chronicling the strange, mythic encounters of your Exiles before you move on. The density comes in all the many, many things you’ll need to do to actually achieve this. The Banished Vault requires intense micromanagement and nose for efficiency for success – in fact it requires this for it to be fun.
To gather resources, for instance, you’ll need to travel to the planets – and, in the right circumstances, their outer orbits – which requires fuel. Fuel requires a Fuel Producer – of course! – which is a building you construct on planet surfaces. Constructing it requires Iron, which requires an Iron Extractor, while crafting it requires Water, which requires a Water Extractor. Each of these requires an Exile to be manually assigned to the building and that building manually operated by you, literally clicking the button to extract or produce the resource in question, physically dragging and dropping it from the building’s inventory to your ship’s inventory, or in the other direction as required, and all of this before you’ve even gathered enough fuel for a single ship to move.