Vane

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.