Vane Reviews
While visually impressive at times, Vane suffers from an unclear purpose and far too many technical issues to recommend it.
There's only so much to say about Vane, an exploratory experience one can get through in a single sitting, without veering into spoiler territory. Vane is a game that feels like it wears its thematic elements on its sleeve, all without a single spoken or written word. Those themes include “instinct” and “exploration” at the ground level, and from there are likely up to how the individual player perceives the story as it develops. In its refusal to hold your hand or even guide you a little, Vane feels like it stands out among its peers as a vehicle to deliver narrative agency for players, not because they have a list of choices to sift through, but because they are presented with an environment and scenario that is so freely open to interpretation. With Vane, you get out what you put in, and while you may not come back to it multiple times, that first one is a doozy.
Vane has a great premise, but it's overshadowed by glitches, bugs, graphics bugs, and a wild camera.
Review in German | Read full review
Despite the magnificent aesthetic inspiration and the stunning overall atmosphere, Friend & Foe is unfortunately no Team ICO (especially concerning some of the key aspects that make a video game worth playing): as a result Vane is an imperfect, uneven and at times even excruciating adventure. But also one that, along with its lows, is still capable of memorable, evocative highs.
Review in Italian | Read full review
The new PlayStation 4 exclusive third-person adventure Vane is broken, ploddingly slow, and completely confused about what it's trying to do.
Initially intriguing by his 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 fast, served by a technique too much weak in regard to its size and a lack of sensation, which it does not manage to tie the bottom and the form of its experiment.
Review in French | Read full review
The art of a game, however distinctive, matters little if it isn't accompanied by functionality.
Vane boasts some gorgeous visuals for an indie game but sadly suffers from a litany of bugs and strange design choices.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, Vane’s most interesting segment is overshadowed by how it manages to combine all of the game’s problems.
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.
Review in Italian | Read full review
There is nothing about Vane that redeems it. This review reads like a list of complaints instead of constructive criticism because there isn't even anything to be constructive about. It's a game that's a challenge to play simply because it challenges your patience.
Six months later, Vane got rid of critical errors, but did not become a good game. A dark story about the fall of civilization, sometimes nice puzzles, beautiful landscapes of the desert world and a powerful atmosphere can not pull boring gameplay, terrible controls, empty locations, indistinct ending and the lack of adequate navigation. And this is sad.
Review in Russian | Read full review
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.
Vane has some good ideas, but in stretching them out for too long across a pretty empty world, it soon becomes tiresome and frustrating.
Whether you’re a big indie fan or a newbie like me, Vane is well worth your time.
A missed opportunity. Vane had a lot of potential, but finally it wasn't used in terms of creating a compeling game.
Review in Spanish | Read full review