A game by Lantern Hollow · Coming 2026
VAULT
Open the door once.
Vault is a single-player narrative adventure set in an underground archive that does not behave the way an archive should. You arrive in the autumn of 1962. The door closes behind you. The vault begins to remember you back.
/// the world
You are not the first to come down.
The vault is an underground archive built during a war that nobody fought, by a government that nobody now remembers authorizing it. Records of its construction were lost in a fire that the records department deny ever happened. The door has been opened seventeen times since 1947. Each time, the vault has returned the visitor with three months of memory missing and a small wooden token they cannot account for.
You are the eighteenth visitor. The token is in your right pocket. The door has closed. There are eleven days of recorded supplies in the eastern hall, more than that in the western wing if you can stay warm enough to use it.
/// recovered fragment 04 · the eastern hall, before the fire 
/// recovered fragment 11 · corridor west, lamp 6 still on 
/// recovered fragment 17 · observation deck, looking out
“The vault is not haunted. The vault is paying attention.”
/// dev diary
Entries from the team, in the voice of the vault.
The team writes development notes in the voice of the archivists who first catalogued the vault in 1947. The technical work the team is doing each week is the same. The voice changes the relationship.
21·VIII·1962
Entry the eleventh
On the door at the eastern hall
There is a door at the eastern hall that opens only when the rain stops. We have not yet found a way to open it on a clear day. The crew above ground reports the door was once an entrance. None of them remember it being closed.
07·IX·1962
Entry the fourteenth
What the lantern knows
The lantern in the second corridor goes out for thirty seconds, every two hours, on the hour. We have measured this against three timepieces. The light returns without intervention. The mechanism, if there is a mechanism, is not on the wall. It is somewhere we have not found.
30·IX·1962
Entry the eighteenth
A note left for whoever finds it
If you are reading this and the candle to your left is still lit, do not extinguish it. The candle is not for you. The candle is for the room, and the room remembers being lit. We learned this the hard way.
14·X·1962
Entry the twenty-second
On staying through the cold months
The vault stays warm in the eastern wing. The western wing has not been warm in any season we have been here. We do not yet know whether to consider this a property of the vault or a property of the wing.
/// pre-order
Three editions. The vault keeps count.
Pre-orders unlock the day-one heirloom item and credit the player in the eighteenth-visitor archive at launch. Allocations for the Curator edition are released in waves. Refunds available up to launch day.
Edition
$32
- The full game, on launch day.
- Original soundtrack as digital download.
- The eleven dev diaries collected as a PDF folio.
Lantern Edition
$58
- Everything in Edition.
- A printed eleven-entry dev diary, hand-bound, from the studio.
- The full score on a single 33⅓ vinyl pressing, limited run.
- An in-game heirloom item gifted to the player on day one.
Curator
$140
- Everything in Lantern Edition.
- A signed art print from the studio's principal designer.
- An invitation to the launch evening at the studio in Lantern Hollow.
- Limited to two hundred. Allocations released in waves.
/// from the press
What writers have said about the vertical slice.
“The first hour of Vault is the most committed atmosphere I have walked through this year. It does not show off. It listens.”
Edge, October 2025
“A studio that knows what it has. The team did not show me a feature list. They showed me a door, and asked if I wanted to open it.”
RPS, IndieCade 2025
Press kit available on request, by writing to the studio at press@lanternhollow.example.