The Banished Vault and what remains

Each time I booted up The Banished Vault, I was faced with the prospect of its 41 hidden achievements: tantalizing markers of progress, success, and milestones to come. Released in 2023 and developed by Bithell Games, The Banished Vault has been alternately described as punishing or divinely beautiful in the manner of mathematics. You take control of a small group of exiled spacefarers in the far reaches of the universe trying to outrun a void-spreading darkness known as the gloom. The game makes clear its bleak stakes early on: You’ve already lost.

Your group spends their time desperately gathering enough resources to survive another jump to the next system, one step ahead of death. Your goal is not to survive. It is simply to leave a record for those to come after your inevitable death. Mechanically this entails cold, calculating resource management. Each new, procedurally generated star system challenges you to make the best of increasingly bad situations, each with a 30-turn timer before you are consumed by the void. Still, the promise of those achievements drew me on. Even in the face of the void, they worked as an effective carrot on the proverbial stick.

Your team of exiles have no identities. They possess names, meager abilities that can help your quest, and (decreasing) faith in your mission. But they come across as nothing more than mechanical variables to help or hinder you. I could not recall any of their names, even while actively playing. By design they are anti-characters. Like the void in which they struggle, they lack form, definition. Still, they are yours. And I wanted to care for them. 

The oft-mentioned punishing aspect of the game is, presumably, the finality it imposes on every decision. There is no undo button. I accidentally clicked End more than once with no recourse. Miscalculate the fuel needed for a return jump and there is no way to reload an earlier save—you can only restart a whole system. Its brutality is that of math itself, though simplified for player consumption. In a video produced by the developer, it is stated: “The Banished Vault uses a simplified version of orbital mechanics, which allows the math to feel realistic without being too complex or frustrating to work with.” Simplified, I suppose, in that the developers actually got realistic orbital mechanics working but had to dial them back because they weren’t particularly enjoyable to navigate.

As is, the game fuses the simplicity of algebra (every problem has an answer) with the bleak worldbuilding of Soulsborne games (sometimes those answers are that you are doomed). Your goal is to complete your task before the gloom, an amorphous black cloud, washes over your system and your group, rendering resources unharvestable, ships defunct, and people useless. The game’s faith mechanic is a similar shout into the void: Your exiles need faith stats in order to meet challenges, determined by weighing their faith against a roll of the dice. Things are not going well, but they might be okay, this stat seems to say. But your faith decreases with every jump to a new system. You can’t keep going forever. Like everything else, belief is a finite resource.

So many games offer post-game experiences that reward the player, like New Game+ runs that increase the difficulty, expose new mechanics, or offer new story elements. On a more fundamental level, these moments mean that you have hit a milestone. You have played the game. You are here now. You were there. In The Banished Vault, the goal of your team of exiles, really, is the same as yours the player. To prove that you did something. To complete a run is to complete the chronicle of your journey. By constructing a specific building in four different systems, your exiles make a record of their experiences and in the process expose bits of lore about the world of the game. The player gets brief glimpses of a cult-like devotion to your mission, a vast and Gothic religious organization, and the rituals they take to combat the void. Your goal is to be seen, to be known, by whomever comes next. 

In the narrative of the game, such as it is, your group writes a chronicle of your journey and your reward is a pop-up describing your achievement. “The chronicle is complete and inscribed into records chamber deep within the Auriga. It will transmit continually until death or the gloom takes it. This is the last written words of the surviving exiles.”

[Spoilers ahead. Turn away, lest your faith stat decrease.]

And then… the game summarily deletes your save file, invites you to start a new one, and kicks you back to the title screen where no record exists that you have ever played the game.

In an experience fundamentally about running from the void, the ultimate reward to the player is an unavoidable confrontation with it. Rarely have I felt such a profound blend of success, loneliness, and loss playing a game. The ending screen promised the record of my journey would live on, but then the game ripped that from me. I played The Banished Vault on a Steam Deck, and, for whatever reason, the system failed to record my achievements. Run after run, I was confronted with a blank title screen and 0/41 achievements unlocked. Every time I started the game I was faced with the promise of a future that I couldn’t attain. Every time, my faith in the journey diminished slightly. 

While The Banished Vault is far from the only game that plays with the sacred save file for narrative purposes (the Nier series is a memorable example), rarely does the mechanic so perfectly serve to meld mechanics, narrative, and player experience. The Banished Vault made me feel deeply, and it did so by carefully manipulating my own anxieties about personal and public records. The game layers its mysteries around a core paradox: an unspoiled narrative experience leads to no thing to spoil. Instead, the game forces the player to meditate on why we play at all, why we seek narrative and consequence. It asks us to confront nothingness and our place within it.

0/41 achievements. Start a new game.