This odd, clunky sci-fi puzzle game is breaking my brain - The Banished Vault Quick Review

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PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

This is a tough call. Some players will be immediately put off by The Banished Vault’s refusal to do many of the computational functions we normally take for granted in games, like clearly indicating how much fuel and resources you’ll need for a journey. Others, however, will be thrilled by its commitment to a somber, board game look and feel. The Banished Vault reminds me of Frank Herbert’s Dune universe, in which computers and AI have been banned forever after seizing too much control from humanity. My first hour with the game was frustrating, but after completing my first solar system, I’m excited to play more.

TIME PLAYED

So far, I’ve played two hours of The Banished Vault. Bithell Games sent me a copy with the slim but dense physical manual, and I’ve spent a good deal of time poring over that in addition to my time in-game. I’ve played through the two tutorial scenarios twice, completed the first “real” system on my journey, and started planning my approach to the second. Now that I’m getting the hang of things, it feels like playing FTL: Faster Than Light on an abacus.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Fantastic style. The Banished Vault looks and feels like a tabletop board game that’s spread out to cover every visible surface. Each ship and planetary structure is represented by a hand-crafted figurine, while characters are represented by illustrated cards. Stars glow and planets rotate on the game board, but most everything else is static. There were no fancy effects competing for my attention, and if something was going to happen in my game, I had to push pieces around and place cards in the correct spots.

• Plans-based puzzling. The Banished Vault is about a group of travelers fleeing a galactic cataclysm called the Gloom. They’re crossing space in a massive Vault, where they sleep during the long interstellar voyages between systems. In each system, I had to send my sleepers out on my fleet of ships to harvest resources and refine them, ultimately creating enough of a resource called Stasis to put everyone back to sleep and set out on the next leg of the journey.

Each step of that process required careful planning, and since there were only a set number of turns in each system before the Gloom showed up, I never had much leeway for error. My goals and the rules set up around pursuing them organically created a new, challenging puzzle every time I entered a new system as I worked out where I was going to get carbon dioxide, water, iron, and titanium, and then how much fuel I’d need to get to those locations, and where I was going to take everything to refine it into Stasis before getting everyone back to the Vault. It’s a lot to think about, and The Banished Vault left me to my own devices to figure things out.

• Physical manual. The Banished Vault was surprisingly stingy about keeping track of information and goals for me, and instead insisted that I refer to the manual. The physical edition is great to be able to refer to, and is packed with moody artwork and lore. Fortunately, if you don’t feel like making that extra purchase, a digital version is always immediately available at the touch of a button.

WHAT SUCKS

• Deliberately clunky. The Banished Vault surprised me with how much it refuses to do in terms of the little clerical tasks I take for granted in games. It made me count in my own brain how many units of titanium and iron I had to cart out to a planet where the resources were needed to build new facilities and refine my Stasis. This made it highly annoying at first: Simply planning out a trip for one spaceship felt weird and daunting, and I wasn’t sure if I was doing things the right way. The Banished Vault wouldn’t tell me either, and the only way I found out was by winding up with ships stranded between planets because I didn’t consider how fuel costs change along with a ship’s mass over the course of a journey.

• Very slow. This is another deliberate choice, but The Banished Vault is pretty light on action, which made time crawl while I played, particularly during my first hour or so. As I got more used to the systems involved and became more engrossed thinking about the problems I had to solve, this got a lot better—but again, the game itself did not do much to help me get to that point.

💬 Does the idea of a Dune-inspired board game make your neurons light up, or do you prefer to have more Space Marines in your interstellar monasteries? Let me know what you think of The Banished Vault in the comments below.