Review: The Banished Vault

destructoid.com:

I have never encountered a game that has made me feel as stupid as The Banished Vault does. There have certainly been titles with mechanics of abyssal depth or vast nuance that I don’t have the dedication to wrap my head around, but this is an absolutely new level. It’s layers of things that just make me feel mentally deficient.

And I actually had to stop playing far earlier than I intended, because there was this ever-present shame that kept clawing at my spine. I was hoping that if I kept scratching at the game’s layers, something would click and suddenly it wouldn’t seem like such a monumental task. Yet, the more I played it, the more uncomfortable I was. Enough is enough. I just need to unpack right now.

The Banished Vault (PC) Developer: Lunar Division Publisher: Bithell Games Released: 25 Jul, 2023 MSRP: TBA

The Banished Vault drew me in with its beautiful but highly unusual concept. It’s a strange marriage of religious imagery and hard science fiction. It’s monks in space, but the absolute literal sense. There’s nothing fanciful about its depiction of science fiction, it’s the most literal interpretation of both subjects.

The eponymous “Vault” is actually a space monastery where survivors of a strange phenomenon called “The Gloom” are taking shelter. The survivors spend their time traveling between star systems in suspended animation thanks to “stasis.” Every so often, they must stop at a star system in order to manufacture more stasis to allow them to continue their flight from The Gloom.

The goal of The Banished Vault is actually to find time during your escape to pen the Four Chronicles that can only be written in special buildings on hallowed planets. So, you collect resources, create stasis, and pen your