Vane Reviews
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.
Like so much fine art, this piece loses its luster when you start to dissect and interpret it. So don't. Because it's fucking dope
Vane has a great premise, but it's overshadowed by glitches, bugs, graphics bugs, and a wild camera.
Review in German | Read full review
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.
An ungainly but hypnotic exploration of worlds in the making and unmaking, and a fresh spin on the ethos of Team Ico's games and Journey.
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.
Vane is an intriguing game with a variety that encourages you to dig deep into its dubious world, but its sluggish controls hamper this peculiar experience.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
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 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's atmosphere, music, world, and abstract story are affecting and strange, but the bugs and design lead to unnecessary frustration
Video games have really changed as a storytelling medium. what was once a casual dash from left-to-right, dropping baddies and collecting shiny objects, opened up into new realms of drama, narrative and even philosophical messages. Of course, that doesn't make these games immediately any better than the goofy platformers and shmups of gaming's formative years, but it has been amazing to see the many different ways gaming has been adapted by talented designers to tell all manner of dark, abstract and inquisitive tales.Into a busy market of chin-stroking titles such as The Missing, Gris and Gone Home comes Vane, a new PS4 adventure from Tokyo outfit Friend or Foe. Vane, like its brethren, eschews typical action gameplay to present a mood-piece adventure, not dissimilar from the work done by Team ICO. Vane wants to put freedom back in the hands of the player, letting them engage in a strange, mystical journey - without hand-holding - and with player-led discovery being the ultimate prize.
Vane could have been an amazing experience, since it is based on some great ideas, but it seems that the developers didn't have the budget to materialize them.
Review in Greek | Read full review
The industry can always use more risky passion projects like this, even if they don’t always reach their full potential.
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.
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.
Vane is an interesting, beautiful, and provocative indie platformer brought down by design inconsistencies and bugs, but fans of the genre will find something to like here.
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
Vane has some good ideas, but in stretching them out for too long across a pretty empty world, it soon becomes tiresome and frustrating.
It's very clear where Vane draws it's influence from, the problem is that despite beeing a beautiful a project with satisfactory puzzles, it can not at any time reach the level of its predecessors, and worse than that, it inherits from these projects a bunch of technical problems that here are even worse. There are very good things inside VANE, but the sum of its factors does not result in anything remarkable.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review