The Banished Vault begins in a bad place. There’s no hope-filled moment where you load up and secure your wagon and family for the long road towards a new life in the Pacific Northwest. There’s no peons ready to cheerfully till dark soil into bountiful farmland or raise the infrastructure of a city. There are no grandiose dreams of the future, of settlement, colonization and expansion. When The Banished Vault generates its first solar system for you, it’s not expecting you to create civilization, expand an empire, or negotiate trade relations. That part of your life is over. You tried it, and it went bad. Really bad. You went to the inky edge of the cosmos, found a nightmare that even your God crumpled upon witnessing, and now you’re scrambling to survive long enough to tell your story.
The first game from director Nic Tringali at Bithell Game’s new Lunar Division, The Banished Vault has been described by me as “what if a Euro board game was squeezed through an indie journaling bookmark game,” “a brutal tutorial in logistics wrapped in a cruel test of executive function,” and “a minimal approach to a maximalist mobile game exclusively for a self-hating god.” But, mostly, I’ve been referring to my 30+ hours spent reviewing The Banished Vault as “the worst time four guys can have in a boat.”
There is nothing better than men having a bad time in a boat.
Before the game begins, the Auriga Vault was working on some kind of Gene Wolfe by way of Ridley Scott by way of Terry Gilliam colonial religious society with a heaping spoonful of Walter M. Miller, Jr. (and less Games Workshop, though comparisons are expected). Then calamity struck. The Gloom ruined everything. And the monastery-city vessel, the Auriga Vault, became a limping nutmeg of consolation. Suffice to say, the Exiles of the Auriga Vault are having a cosmically fucking bad time.
Much of the game plays out on a map that resembles an Atreides’ war table one might expect to find in early concept art for David Lynch’s Dune. Everything vibrates with a dull warmth. Dimly glittering starfields are inscribed with precise and ritualistic Utopian geometry. The pathways between planets themselves are marked with scalpel-straight alloyed-gold lines that break with efficient angles. At the bottom of every map, a giant throbbing star, and at the top the Auriga Vault, her four Exiles, and their interplanetary transports, which resemble little brass plumb bobs as much as they do spacecraft.
Between maps, Exiles hibernate through an occult ritual with a substance called Stasis, a rare resource that must be produced (not extracted) from more common extracted resources. Each map is its own puzzle to first determine if it is even possible to produce Stasis with the available planetary resources, and then to do so efficiently by navigating your Exiles to build little micro-settlements, ferrying resources between them, while avoiding hazards (narrative crises which play out with skeuomorphic dice rolls based on each Exile’s dwindling Faith stat), within the 30 turns allowed. It looks very easy, it sounds very easy, and it is absolutely a fucking nightmare.
Before deciding to give my Exiles a moment of reprieve and putting them in a semi-permanent hibernation to actually write this review, my desk was littered with scraps of paper covered in math. My phone had math in it. My Google Keep had to-do lists with the buildings I needed to still construct, an ever changing accounting of resources on hand vs resources needed. At one point, I just wrote “WHERE IS THE FUCKING SILICA, DAVE?” at the top of a quartered sheet of printer paper next to a little symbolic drawing of HAL9000.
I have mild dyscalculia and I forget what I’m doing when I walk across the room half the time. But here I am in charge of the lives of not only these four Exiles but the God-knows-how-many souls aboard the Auriga Vault’s cyclopean space ark. It’s a lot of pressure. Space is hard. Thank god the game has a built-in energy calculator. Every time I have to plot a planetary maneuver, I pull it up and think of the scene from Apollo 13 where the NASA nerds whip out their slide rules. I never used one. My grandfather told me it was easier than a calculator once you got used to it. My mother thought they were bullshit, but she also struggled with punch card computing. I half expect the systems that keep my Exiles alive are based on punch cards, to be honest. Where fellow Philadelphian Kevin Bacon assertively defends his calculations with a defiant “I can add,” I am less certain. Hence, the necessity of the slide rule, the scraps of paper, and my commensurate high failure rate.
Space is hard, and pressure is everywhere in The Banished Vault. While playing, I constantly recalled a Twitter thread discussing just how absurd the idea that Elon Musk (or any rich asshole) could manage travel to and settlement of Mars within our lifetimes. It pointed out the tremendous amounts of global resources needed to keep the ISS functioning in Low Earth Orbit, and all the calamity, technology, and human life that went into getting and maintaining our limited presence in space thus far. Space is hard, space doesn’t care, space will absolutely kill you if you make mistakes. Mistakes can be as simple as thinking you have enough iron or water.
Nothing is more important than iron and water. The beautifully illustrated manual drives this point home, while also offering a fully accessible in-game table of resources, structure costs, and what each thing produces. I refer to this constantly. Within the game the page is bookmarked, as though it were permanently open on my giant Atreidean space desk, along with some undoubtedly cool-as-hell, ornate Space Monk shit. While the manual is peppered with little bits of fluff that set an incredible aesthetic tone, you’ll have to do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself if you’re hoping for a truly rich narrative experience. What’s here is really good though, the vibes are as impeccable as the scratchy ink drawings that make up the art in the manual, portraits of the Exiles, and narrative interludes.
While I did inevitably play through several hour-long journeys listening to podcasts (something I regularly do with MMOs or now Diablo IV), my desire to catch up on my listening backlog didn’t click with The Banished Vault. For some this game may be an ideal “podcasts in bed” sort of game, but for me the soundtrack and sound design are simply too good to skip out on. Decisions are made with satisfying mechanical clunks. The soft, dull thud of pragmatic switches and buttons chirrup with the electrical chime of bells held by dampening gloved hands. Sounds are received at a distance, through aether, in the haze of interstellar space; they have depth and weight of gloomy portends and doomed electromechanics. Every sound has a pleasing tactile sensation that drills and vibrates at the base of the skull, exhilarating like trepanation. The space monks who built these systems were clearly never lacking in a fastidious devotion to their occult aesthetics. The soundtrack by nervous_testpilot and DREAMTRAK only serves to bolster the vibe heavy atmosphere of The Banished Vault. Everything works in concert to create a piece that is so singularly focused on its particular harmonic groove—even if that groove is one of the horrifying indifference of the cosmos echoing back at your pleas.
Space is hard. Space is unfeeling. But perhaps it is in our nature to aspire towards overcoming it.
I haven’t completed a chronicle yet. Every instance of my journeys as the abstracted arbiter of the Auriga Vault has ended in doom. Presently all three of my save slots are filled, an approach I picked up from Alexis Ong—friend, colleague, and during our time simultaneously reviewing The Banished Vault, my “RMS Carpathia.” All but one journey is destined to be imminently deleted and restarted. One is entirely out of fuel and iron (I foolishly built a Titanium extractor over a now-necessary Water resource). In another timeline only one exile remains and is carrying out his religious orders with grim, ordained purpose. The last one dances on a knife’s edge, keeping just ahead of the Gloom, just ahead of resource depletion. It is a logistical, spiritual, and mathematical high-wire act. Eventually they’ll run out of resources, time, or lives.
I might just delete them all to spare myself the anxiety.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
Before these three, there were more. I’ve hit countless dead ends. Whole micro-settlements lost, timelines where the Auriga Vault is consumed by the Gloom after its Exiles died in Halo: Reach-like succession. There are always losses with this kind of thing. Buzz Aldrin doesn’t get to sit at a table wearing three watches and eating as many eggs without someone having to remember that Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee were incinerated in the Apollo 1 plug-out test. Eventually a very rich man will die in space on a rocket with a giant X pasted to the side. Maybe he’ll take out a half dozen or more other rich men with him along with his delusions of being a prince of Mars. Even with all the lessons learned, space remains hard.
I have littered the cosmos with men whose names I don’t remember, ones I didn’t make space for amidst my notations. Men who truly had bad times. Many never even managed to establish a colony to be lost. Never got to inscribe their first desperate “Croatoan” on some barren rock. Their exile ended abruptly and then in one click, any evidence of it ever existing vanished. Space is so hard it seems cruel. Both the Carpathia and I took to calling the game The Punished Vault because of this in our signals to one another.
There is a part of me that is desperate for an undo button. Just one move. That’s all I want. Something to drop me back one step, a half-step really. For those times when I’m not paying attention and I’ve misclicked, forgotten to carry a digit. Misread part of an equation and ended my little Exiles’ lives far too soon on a mishap. When I thought I was too good for the Energy Calculator and could just eyeball it.
But this isn’t that kind of game.
I’m sure everyone on the Titanic wanted an undo button too. I’m sure the billionaires on the OceanGate Titan would have loved one. Bligh, Christian, and all the rest of the crew of HMS Bounty. Shackleton. The Challenger crew. There’s not a boat in this world real or imagined where someone didn’t have a bad time they wanted to take even just one step back from. That’s the kind of game The Banished Vault is.
Before I decided it was time to break from playing and settle in for the long process of writing my chronicle of the Auriga Vault, I sent a signal to my Carpathia, far away in another ocean entirely. It read: I was wrong. It’s not the men having a bad time. It’s me. And I’m loving every horrible minute of it.
The Banished Vault is developed by and published by Lunar Division and Bithell Games. It’s available for Steam and Steam Deck.
Dia Lacina is a queer indigenous writer and photographer. She tweets too much at @dialacina.