A strategy game of exploring solar systems and overcoming a hostile universe, set aboard the Auriga Vault, an interstellar gothic monastery. Venture into solar systems with a crew of Exiles, the last inhabitants of doomed Vault. Explore procedurally generated solar systems, harvest resources and artifacts, and survive by creating Stasis to keep your Exiles alive during hibernation.
the Banished Vault is somewhat deceptive, given its appearance. it looks and sounds at first blush like a moody sort of turn-based roguelike, perhaps like Darkest Dungeon, but the actual gameplay is as the store page presents it: a board game style resource management game. it's still moody, of course, and the atmosphere has a sci-fi horror short story style to it. aesthetically, the illustrated bits remind me of the board game Ascension, which has a similar sort of hand-drawn, nearly wood-cut style.
don't expect a lot of in-depth "lore" or long form narrative- i doubt anyone will want to have a wiki to read for the details of this game's world, but i think that's really a mark in its favor. the sparseness of details it gives you on the world mirrors the sparseness of space, with just as much potential in those empty spaces. while it is a very vibes based game, it is also a bit like if Chess had a sick soundtrack and you got to read a few cool lines of prose whenever you reached checkmate. it might be best to approach it with that sort of expectation in mind.
the friction that you might detect on playing the game and interacting with the ui appears to be intentional. it is smooth where it wants to be smooth, and harsh where it doesn't. the game is explicitly uninterested in giving you much of any resource tracking or calculator outside of the energy calculator and the handy numbers by each resource icon in the inventory. you can easily imagine the resources being presented as small tokens in a board game, so it mirrors the same lack of automated tracking.
full disclosure on the game's difficulty: i have only fully finished one journey of the game and i think i was probably pretty lucky to do so. i have had several other less successful runs, and the lack of any kind of undo or save ability made for a pretty harsh experience. there is the option to restart a system once or unlimited amount of times, depending on the difficulty you'd like to go with. that's pretty close to allowing saves, given the very mechanistic nature of the mechanics - you just have to remember what moves you made on the last run. regardless, if you want a chill time without too much deep thought, this game is probably not going to be your jam.