Hello gentle readers, and welcome to the SwitchArcade Round-Up for February 8th, 2021. In today’s article, we’ve got a Mini-View of inkle’s recent release Heaven’s Vault. Along with that, we’ve got summaries of the latest releases to hit the eShop. It’s another weak batch, unfortunately. Well, we’ll try to find some fun in it anyway. We round things out with the usual lists of new and outgoing sales, and those don’t disappoint this time. Let’s get into it!
Mini-Views
Heaven’s Vault ($17.99)

I kind of waffled about whether to do a review or Mini-View for this one, but ultimately I think I can sum up my thoughts on this game in a paragraph. It has everything you would expect and want from an inkle game: great writing, gorgeous art, and a stellar soundtrack. Although it is at its core a choice-based narrative game, it’s a very open one. The heart of the game involves trying to figure out how to translate a language, word by word. If that sounds interesting to you, hop in. If it sounds boring, it probably will be. Pacing is all over the place and there are definitely some stretches where the game could afford to put a little more hop in its step. A bigger problem is the dull mini-game you engage in for traveling, which takes far too much time and has a nasty tendency to crash the game every now and then. Not often enough to bother me terribly, but frequently enough to mention here. Even with its issues, this is ...