It’s not very often that I see an indie game, forget about it, then get excited at the mention of its name years later, yet that’s exactly what happened with Vane. I remember seeing its first trailer back in 2014, just a couple years after my momentous experience with Journey. This seemed to mesh that with the likes of something from Team Ico, and I’m hardly one to complain about a mashup like that. Having spent time with it though, I can’t help but feel quite a bit has changed from that initial trailer. But then again, it’s been more than four years since that teaser, so it’s expected the game would have evolved in that time.

The game oozes with atmosphere, symbolism, and puzzles. There are four acts to the game, each distinctive from the rest. If you’re short on time, you may find out the hard way that the game only saves at the beginning of these acts, so if you make progress without hitting a (obnoxiously long) loading screen, you can expect to start from the beginning of that section. But to be clear, these acts won’t take too much time, especially when you know what you’re doing.

As all the trailers showcase, you will spend the first portion of the game in the desert, following a rather action packed opening sequence that included an unexpected amount of synthwave. I’m not one to shy away from the genre, but it’s not what I’d expect from a game like this. It sets a completely different tone for the rest of the game, but that’s far from a bad thing. In the desert, you’ll spend most of your time soaring through the skies as a bird. You’ll notice that the camera is very keen on spinning around, or bringing you in close to give a cinematic feel as you traverse the barren land in search of birds to pile on a weather vane. While the screenshots and trailer shows expansive landscapes and beauty in the loneliness, I couldn’t help but feel bored after a few minutes. Exploration yielded very little of consequence, and the game made it fairly obvious what you needed to do with visual cues.

One of the faults for exploration being a miss is the way the bird controls. It’s not that the bird fails to do what you want like the dragon in Oure, but it’s hardly the effortless experience that is presented in Aer. Speeding up seems to be hit or miss, although this is only an issue for this portion of the game, as it’s where you’ll spend the majority of your time in this form traversing large areas. But control issues don’t stop with flight. When you’re a human, the game has a number of problems, especially when coupled with NPCs. There’s a portion of the game that requires you push an object with other people, as you cannot do so yourself. You need at least one other person to push with you. If you happen to push this object up what’s the equivalent of two steps without an in-between or an alternate path to get up there, the AI will just stand around without attempting to reach it. You can jump and climb, but apparently they can’t. I had to start over several times due to this. I also tried moving on without them and ended up bugging the game. Act 3 was played many times before finally moving on.

Perhaps one of the more frustrating things once you’re past act 1 is how dark the game is. I don’t mean thematically; the environments meant I had to play the game while in a dark room if I didn’t want to miss out on the beautifully crafted world. This plays into the visual cues, as you’ll often times be drawn to where you need to go based on what is lit up. However, it’s sometimes necessary to traverse through the darkness, and other times the game’s lighting will just go funky for a minute and you won’t be able to see anything. In the event you end up dying and there’s an endless loop of resetting, that isn’t part of the game either, so go ahead and quit out.

It may sound like I didn’t like the game because of all the technical issues I encountered, but there’s something worth seeing when you boil things down. It’s less predictable than Rime, and a great starting point for the studio Friend & Foe. The mechanics are sound, and the story is worthy of anyone that enjoys the more ambiguous symbolism heavy video games of the past few years. And honestly, who doesn’t love turning into a bird when the fall would normally kill you?

Being listed under the Must Play section of the PlayStation Store, I expected Vane to get under my skin and stick with me for days after my time with it. Instead, I’ll remember it for its potential that was spawned from a TGS trailer, and look forward to the dev’s next game, hoping what they learned isn’t in vain.

6 out of 10

Pros

• Atmospheric
• Synths
• Transformation

Cons

• Bird Navigation
• AI Pathing
• Glitches

Vane was developed and published by Friend & Foe. It is currently available on PS4 for $24.99. The game was provided to us for review on PS4. If you’d like to see more of Vane, check out the developer’s official site.

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

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