Vane

Vane doesn’t like to follow many rules. It seems to care even less about the consequences. If its choices are perceived as deliberate subversions of common themes, Vane can feel like a freestanding revolution. If the exact same moves are recognized as obfuscating and inert, Vane can feel like a frustrating waste of time. Caught between Vane’s convictions are despairing performances issues that definitely didn’t seem like part of either appraisal.

The first of Vane’s five wildly different chapters begins with a cataclysmic thunderstorm. Darkness envelopes a mess of reflective metal and an abundance of conspicuous polygons. The player controls a humanoid figure as it rushes toward a tower. Contrary to supposed instruction, you’re intended to about-face and run away from the tower. Mushy player-control makes this feel more difficult than it should be, much like the lack of clear direction toward an objective. Minutes later, the chapter ends.

Vane’s title card drops and suddenly you’re a bird. Flight is effective but awkward; it takes a while to get used to creating lift with button-tapping wing-flapping while using the wind to soar at a more satisfactory speed. Vane is now an open world, a vast, thriving, and totally abandoned desert trapped on all sides by a boundary of sandstorms. Within the desert are the occasional oasis, curious large rock configurations, deep canyons, and what may or may not be remnants of human infrastructure. The world is large and immediately made me question that scale at which I thought Vane was planning to operate. This didn’t feel like a small game.

You’re intended to locate four of five (standing) vane structures to proceed with Vane’s tangible narrative. Vanes are tucked in landmark areas of the open world and tipped off by the iridescent flares that appear on the periphery the screen when your bird flies across a relevant area. Vane’s means of open communication are, barring a few button prompts, non-existent. It wants the player to learn by playing and only by playing, which is a facet of Vane that is only a problem later on when it struggles to maintain coherence.

There’s something about Vane’s look that sets it apart from its peers. Pieces of is desert are openly constructed from flat-shaded polygons, appearing not unlike a hi-res version of Virtua Fighter augmented with the gouraud shading that made Tobal 2 the best looking game on PlayStation. It’s a stylistic choice, but it also opens one of Vane’s deeper mysteries. What the hell is this world? Is there a reason why it’s abandoned, why it’s full of birds, and why pieces of its surface look overtly fabricated? Vane can provide satisfactory answers but does not actively incentivize finding many them.

Vane’s character movement also stands in contrast to modern norms. From the dust that kicks up behind footsteps to the bird’s stunted head movement, there’s a stop-motion animation quality to Vane’s entire aesthetic. This helps sell the frailty of its world and the supernatural nature of its doomed cycle. It’s alien, natural, and synthetic all in the same package.

A point in Vane’s second act transforms the player from bird and back into the human-form of the first act. This alteration then leaves the open world and funnels the player directly to a linear third act, as jumping off the nearby cliff (the only means of escape) turns them back into a bird. It’s a shame because Vane’s vast open world, with odd staircases everywhere, looks like it has hooks for on-foot exploration and a more measured pace. Like Shadow of the Colossus, it creates a tantalizing unknown and makes you want to examine what’s lying around out there.

This is true until it isn’t. Poking around at the deserts darker corners reveals a way to find and explore its world as a human. Finding it is trouble, completing the challenge to make it back to the proper world is arduous, and if you fall—if you touch water or fall too far—you turn back into a bird and it’s all over. There is no reset. The door to do this option is literally sealed and won’t open if you attempt to access it again (as of this writing, Vane is full of bugs and it’s hard to know if this is a feature or an accident). Vane’s second chapter demands a full reset and I have no idea why.

Still, it was worth the effort. I finished the remaining three chapters of Vane in about two hours and then I went back and explored its open world for another three. I worked my way up to peaks I didn’t know I could reach and I was pleased to find that I could. I walked incredibly slowly across every surface I could find and found a more intimate, isolated experience, and one that was fundamentally different than soaring over the same land a bird.

I still wonder why any of it was there. Was Vane originally a different game and are all of these assets composed of leftovers? Is the experience that I feel like I personally discovered—there’s a trophy for reaching a certain place on foot and it was at 0% before I found it—one that was intended? Is wondering what’s out there as satisfying as seeing it up close? I have no idea! So much of Vane’s open world is just there with tiny hints at what may have come before you got there. It’s Journey without the destination and Proteus without the response to interaction.

The three chapters that conclude Vane are nothing like this. The third is an open but incredibly dark and controlled cave puzzle room. The fourth has the player pushing a giant magic sphere around an escalating series of navigation puzzles, not unlike a less annoying and more controlled version of Marble Madness. The fifth is an interminable ascent up a giant tower that doesn’t know when to get out of its own way. Mechanically, none of these instances stand out. They also don’t have as much, visually or mechanically, to say as Vane’s larger open world.

As a flourish, Vane tries to make something out of its unique aesthetic. Powers granted to the player (by proximity to the large sphere or, later, via direct control) affect and transform the surrounding world in real time. This manifests in an impressive visual effect where pieces of the world are pulled, distorted, and assembled right before your eyes. This can create new platforms or break down perceived barriers and enable forward passage. It also broke down my PlayStation 4 Pro with crippling frame drops.

Vane’s penultimate sequence is where its assembly mechanics get out of control. The player circumnavigates a series of mismatched platforms with awful collision detection, destination unknown. I walked through some walls and I fell through others in a sequence that, like the tower ascent before it, goes on for way too long. This carries over to a larger theme with Vane where I couldn’t tell if I was either doing what was asked and making forward progress or wasting time on a venture that was functionally pointless. Am I missing something is a question I frequently asked myself. Trying to think outside the box felt like punishment and Vane’s true solutions were always its most obvious.

Vane was full of bugs. I finished the game twice. On the second run its climax was absent of music and sound effects, both resources that felt pretty important on the first time around! I also fell through the world constantly. In the fourth act, when I would scout the area as the bird, I would fall into paralyzing spinning sequences that would disorient my position and leave me lost. Vane’s fascinated with darkness but doesn’t seem to grasp that leaving the player in it is neither instructive nor fun. A day after I finished Vane I received an email stating Friend and Foe was desperately working on a fix for some of these issues. I sure hope they’re addressed because it would be a bummer for Vane’s paying audience to also inadvertently join its quality assurance team.

Despite the bugs, the drag of the final three acts, and the pervasive questions of Vane’s intentions, I still loved playing it. The final sequence, with its buzzing synth soundtrack and mind-obliterating bass rips, is a visual knockout and narrative triumph. The agency it leaves to the player, as either a participant or an observer, tries to make good on the wild plot Vane attempts to build. Any screenshot pulled from Vane’s climax—which I didn’t include in this review but it sure was in the trailer—could qualify as visual art.

There’s kind of an implicit panic that sets in when you feel a game veering wildly off course. In the case of Vane’s myriad bugs, it feels foreboding and unfortunate. In the choices it makes with its open world, it’s surreal and welcome. Players looking for an objective-driven experience may be unsatisfied with Vane’s operation. Those expecting a defiant adventure game may be let down by how poorly and repetitive Vane’s ideas are executed. This leaves its mystery, the open validation of a world worth exploring, as its sole, satisfying initiative.

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.