Vane

Vane is a storm of impressions. A beautiful and intriguing journey through innovation and mystery, plagued with bad camera angles, glitches and low framerate. Yet, it somehow manages to keep your sense of wonder over most of its flaws, and be an amazing and breathtaking, but sadly, a short title.

This game won’t be for everyone. A short playtime and lack of instruction of what to do or where to go, coupled with a range of annoying little glitches, may cause many to get frustrated. However the overall look and atmosphere is incredible. You’ll want to explore each location in order to enjoy the game because the pleasure we get from a journey is perhaps more dependent on the mind-set that we travel with, than on the destination we travel to.

Vane feels like an indescribable fever dream when it works, relaying a wordless story about a transforming creature trying to figure out its place in a world that appears to be falling apart. Too often though bugs and a lack of clear direction reminded me that Vane could have used a little bit of extra development time for polish.

Vane exists in an enormously stressed and jagged world of puzzle-platforming. Simply moving around feels rough and unfinished, and that's not always on purpose. If only Friend & Foe had more time to incubate its creation.

Despite the goodwill and beyond the very clear references, Vane is not the apocryphal work of Fumito Ueda that we would have hoped for.

Like the pearlescent shimmer across its desert surface, Vane is difficult to observe and define with precise clarity. Its world presents either an invitation to wonder or a provocation to explore and it’s often seized by the tension pulling it in opposing directions. Vane can be brilliant and subversive or confusing and frustrating and it’s impossible to separate its intentions from its misfortunes.

Vane is an enigmatic game about the force of union and the silent sacrifice of living beings. It looks like an Early Access game, with bugs, glitches and an unnerving slow pace. Sometimes it presents a wonderful world in which the sense of solitude is the key to understand what Friends & Foe wanted to tell in their obscure and strange story.

A missed opportunity. Vane had a lot of potential, but in the end it wasn't used in terms of creating a compelling game.

Vane is a delightfully designed, short game. It is a pity it is trying too hard to impress, cause it forgets to put the player first. The good ideas are just a bit too ambitious for a small studio like this.

Vane is a unique experience and for that in itself Friend & Foe should be applauded. As an artwork, it’s compelling. But as a game, it’s recommended with strings attached: this is a harsh, uncompromising world and you’re going to need to struggle to survive.

Quotation forthcoming.

An atmospheric and often perplexing exploration game that suffers from bugs, uneven level design, and an unwavering dedication to leaving you to your own devices.

Vane lets players shift from the form of a bird to a child as they explore a strange, hallucinatory world set to a fantastic synth soundtrack. But what starts as a liberating flight through a vast desert eventually devolves into a linear trek through cramped corridors. Vane is a strange, haunting game that deserves attention, but it abandons its most interesting ideas too early on.

While Vane may not reach the heights of its contemporaries, the bleak world it paints presents some interesting concepts. However, these ideas fails to coalesce into truly memorable moments, and it continually gets tripped up by technical issues.

It reminds you of Ico or Journey, but this exploration adventure doesn’t reach the depth you’re hoping for and disappoints on a technical level.

The thought behind Vane is fantastic and artistic, which is shown by the creative style and mysterious gameplay. It's a pity that gameplay is very frustrating, mainly due to bad controls and worlds that do not render well.

Vane is a unique, almost-therapeutic experience with a magical world to explore. Unfortunately, the controls are pretty awful. If you can deal with that major issue, though, you'll find a somewhat worthwhile adventure.

Vane is a beautiful game with a magnificent soundtrack, but it lacks direction and accessibility. The camera is always annoyingly close or abrupt far away and there are a lot of bugs in the game.

Vane is the kind of game where you can see what the developers were going for. It has moments where the vision comes together and perhaps you've turned a corner, but all too quickly it goes back to its old, disappointing ways.

Vane is a strange game. Its art direction and visual design frame a grandiose, otherworldly affair, but its puzzle design and narrative squash those expectations, ultimately providing a frustrating experience with fragments of its original vision.

The striking visual language of Friend & Foe’s stunning world is a painful glimpse of how wonderful an experience Vane could have been. Instead, it’s clumsy, careless, and wholly incoherent. [Issue#159, p.90]

Like all games that stress art and atmosphere above all else, appraising Vane is difficult. Some will fall in love with it from the first scene, simply because they appreciate its visual style and engaging music. For me, it’s the game equivalent of tuning in to the fireplace channel on Christmas day. It’s oddly pleasant in its own way, but there’s little substance to it. Vane simply has too many faults and not enough strengths to carry a recommendation. Even in the absence of technical mishaps, it’s simply not engaging or interesting.

The world is beautiful and mysterious and the great music definitely contributes to this nice setting but the game itself somewhat disappoints. There's plenty of technical issues, the letterboxing format blocks your view and the game feels segmented due to being split up into levels. You don't always know where you're going either. A missed opportunity.

Even more damning is that you may have to restart an entire chapter because of an exasperating glitch.

Overall, this game lacks any specific direction beyond what you have to figure out for yourself. You get no introduction to the character or the situation they face. There are game breaking bugs and things that cause frustrations that make someone not want to play the game anymore. That being said, this game has good environments and music.

Vane has some good ideas, but in stretching them out for too long across a pretty empty world, it soon becomes tiresome and frustrating.

Vane is an atypical game, which although it might be associated with Journey or the Team ICO games, fails miserably along the way, losing pace and with technical and design problems in equal parts. It fails to convey to the player either on a narrative level or with its mechanics, ending up frustrating rather than amusing. The effort is appreciated, because it has a beautiful artistic design and has some interesting but frustrating puzzle ideas.

It's all over very soon, too. This is a short game that constantly feels like it's still gearing up towards something better, a way to tie together all its mechanics. The last sections of the game are quite lackadaisical, simplifying the game's systems right down while relying on an investment in the game's thin lore. It's not just that the game doesn't give you easy answers--it also gives you little incentive to come up with your own.

The puzzles are simple in their execution, but their obtuseness can be infuriating at times. The story may begin mysteriously, but both of the endings are unsatisfying, even though the story is still muddled at that point. There are plenty of other titles on the PS4 that do a better job of telling a short and mysterious tale artfully, and your time is better spent with those and saving Vane for a video walkthrough unless you're hunting for Trophies.

Vane has a great premise, but it's overshadowed by glitches, bugs, graphics bugs, and a wildly spinning camera.

Beautiful visuals and suggestive atmospheres are not enough to save Vane, whose obscure and not always working mechanics make the player feel abandoned in a poorly conceived world.

It has a wonderful sound, looks nice, stutters unpleasantly, and is boring as hell. It’s a textbook example of a triumph of form over substance – a charming but overall hollow experience. [03/2019, p.55]

Vane tries without succeeding to present a similar adventure with Journey, where the player could reach his own conclusions about a long-gone mysterious civilization. Here though the information given is extremely vague and in no part of the 2-3 hour trip we could make any assumption of what was going on. Some short-lived interesting gameplay ideas remain extremely unutilized, leaving in the end a game with simple and derivative gameplay along with the almost non-existent story.

It can still look visually striking when viewed from a distance while its audio design, with a brooding electronic score, can also be wonderfully atmospheric. Sadly, it’s not enough to salvage a wholly disappointing experience that never reaches the lofty heights it begins with.

Vane simply doesn’t live up to those games it so achingly apes. It lacks the clearly defined objective and unique aesthetic of Journey; the emotional attachment of The Last Guardian; the intriguing ambiguity of Inside; the charm of Rime. Instead, Vane feels clunky and pretentious, any sense of wonderment outweighed by unnecessary frustration, sluggishness and a lack of clarity.

Vane is an utterly disappointing debut from Friend & Foe: a cryptic adventure that tries to hide behind an evocative graphic style some severe game design issues. A boring, slow, irritating and ultimately forgettable experience.

Vane has a very strong opening, some unique visual ideas, and an atmospheric electronica soundtrack. Unfortunately, all of this is quickly muted by aimless and frustrating gameplay.

Vane is exhausting, ponderous, bewildering, endlessly frustrating, needlessly obtuse, narratively unsatisfying, mechanically clumsy, and technically shoddy, all shot through a camera so ill-equipped to deal with the rudimentary task of showing you what's happening on screen that you might as well pop a blindfold on and try using The Force.

It’s punishing to go through what Vane offers without even the slightest understanding of what Friend & Foe’s grand vision was supposed to be. I went into it with no prior knowledge about the game, and I got as much out of Vane’s final cutscene as I would reading a paragraph of Mandarin. Maybe there’s a secret ending that I missed or a subtext that re-contextualizes the bizarre events that unfold over the course of this brief experience, but until I hear about it, the only thing clear to me about Vane is that I didn’t like it.

Initially intriguing in its artistic direction, mysterious in its final, and even if it has the good idea to offer the happiness of being a bird, Vane goes from meditative to painful far too quickly, fueled by a technique too weak with regard to its size and a lack of sensation, which it does not manage to tie the foundation and the form of its experiment.

Though it boasts a resoundingly striking aesthetic, a haphazard save system coupled with a raft of glitches and a misjudged waypoint system all manage to tarnish what should have been one of the first major indie darlings of the year. Vane is simply too frustrating to recommend in its current form.

This has been one of the most depressing reviews I’ve had to write in a while as I really wanted to like Vane. It’s one of the best-looking indie games on PS4, the atmosphere is rich, and exploring as a bird can be quite exhilarating. In the end, though, a focus on the wrong aspects of gameplay, a confusing and unfulfilling story, and a litany of technical problems at launch make Vane a better game to look at than it is to play.

Everything seems to be made with talent, but there is no atmosphere in the game at all.

Vane is unfinished, its few ideas undermined by its shoddy foundations. If it really were a painting, you'd get Banksy to frame it. [March 2019, p.108]

We’re only a month in and while we may already have some notable highlights, even to those heavily invested in this branch of explorative puzzle games, Vane feels like the first dull low of 2019.

Vane is heavily inspired by several successful indie titles, but borrows from them in all the wrong places and fails to bring anything new to the table. It’s pretty, but not beautiful - not enough to offset the bland gameplay, terrible controls and awkward camera.

Despite its deceptively intriguing prologue, Vane quickly goes from a journey of discovery to a laborious chore, mainly due to the abundance of technical issues and a lack of a decent save system.

With its unique art style, Vane could really have been a jewel. But there are too many flaws, too many game-design errors, too many glitches to be at least enjoyable. Vane is a painful and frustrating experience.

There’s no reward here. Nothing to feel good about. Heck, even the environments aren’t that interesting to look at. This game is bad. It’s just, bad. It’s the concept of Journey, the visuals of Rime but washed out, and the controls of The Last Guardian, but the positives of none of those games. It is a pretender. No original ideas, no grand concept, just borrowed features from games far better than it.

Even when it’s bug-free, the camera is so obnoxious and the movement speed so slow that nearly any activity feels spoiled. Simply soaring through the air as a bird should be more enjoyable than it is here.

If you love pretentious indie games then you may enjoy Vane but those just looking to have fun will likely get irritated with it.