Vane

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.