Review for Vane. Game for PlayStation 4, the video game was released on 15/01/2019
Since its presentation during the Tokyo Game Show back in 2014 Vane has attracted the attention of that segment of the public sensitive to that type of indie productions dedicated to expressing themselves through a silent narrative and a particular visual style. An attention also magnetized by the same development team as Friend & Foe, consisting of former components of major studies such as ICO team e Guerrilla Games. Already from the presentation trailer, a distinct visual reverberation of the works of Fumito Ueda was noticed, a detail that helped to ignite the enthusiasm.
The game took more than four years to complete due to not-so-smooth development, which notably saw the team exiting Rui Warrior - creator and creative force of the title - with experience as an artist in Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian. This loss has certainly also influenced the inspiration of Vane, a title that presents itself as artistically fascinating but playfully unfocused.
We are in an apocalyptic scenario, a ruined world battered by a huge storm that gets worse every minute, throwing rubble and debris into the air. We take control of a yawed figure holding a bundle carefully in its arms and walk a bumpy ride from the increasingly threatening storm. Finally we arrive at the doors of a shelter, but a masked figure pushes us away, closing the entrance behind him. With no more escape, we are caught up in the storm and carried away by the wind.
In the following scene we are cast in the shoes of a crow and pushed to explore the wide spaces of the world around us, desert and apparently empty. After a while we will discover that by coming into contact with a mysterious golden material we can regain our human appearance again and go to places previously inaccessible. Thus begins the cryptic journey of the young shapeshifter.
Vane's advancement can be reminiscent of works like Ico, Journey and Rime, and like them it is defined by marked minimalism and a silent, implicit narrative. The game does not want to respond to the curiosities that may arise in the player, but rather he limits himself to using a symbolic and metaphorical visual language to stimulate his interpretation not so much on what is happening, but on what it represents. An undoubtedly fascinating stylistic choice, but not suitable for all tastes. If you are not in the mood to stop and think, to find a message in what would understandably seem a meaningless and substanceless story, we advise against embarking on Vane, since you will be left with more doubts than anything else.
Already from the first trailers, one of the elements that seemed to distinguish Vane from other indies defined as walking simulators was the presence of environmental puzzles to be solved using the two forms of the protagonist. Throwing himself from great heights, our alter ego automatically transforms into a raven, and in this form he is free to almost completely explore the environments, as well as being able to interact with some elements by recalling other crows. By touching the golden material, accessible only in certain areas, it can assume human form and move objects and doors, actions precluded in its volatile form.
The Friend & Foe guys have deliberately structured the areas in such a way that progress was not taken for granted; the player is encouraged to explore and carefully observe the environment around him to understand for himself what to do. However, the authors have disseminated some clues so as not to leave us totally alone: some objects and areas in fact stand out for a visible glitter even from long distances. Furthermore, the areas useful for advancement are intelligently highlighted through the level design, the use of ambient lighting and the sound sector; a way to implicitly indicate a direction to the most attentive players, without leading them too much by the hand.
The whole thing would certainly be interesting and worthy of praise, if only the game had a consistent difficulty curve and a virtuous development of the game dynamics. What happens instead is that after the first half of the adventure the alternation between human and crow form is left in the background in favor of other more linear mechanisms; the closer you get to the epilogue of the story, the more Vane becomes more and more a real walking simulator, in which the player is just asked to perform an action or jump to the right place to continue.
The puzzles focus more on exploration and intuition than on actual reasoning; the problem is that on several occasions we find ourselves having to travel long distances aimlessly, and in human form the protagonist is slow and imprecise in the controls, followed by a really capricious camera.
Paradoxically, while the plot continues to mount its climax, and with it surprising environmental and visual solutions, the playful component flattens more and more. Mind you, there would be nothing wrong with offering an essential gameplay similar to colleagues such as Journey or ABZÛ, but Vane's premises gave a foretaste of something else. The feeling is that the authors have not been able to develop their own game design ideas throughout the game, which is certainly not too long in the approximately four hours required to complete it.
In the visual sector of Vane the influence of the atmospheres seen in the titles directed by Fumito Ueda such as The Last Guardian is clear. The art direction uses a minimal graphic style very well, captivating the player with a sense of mystery and stimulating the imagination towards his surreal and dreamlike environments. The glimpses of immense deserts or caves with particular play of light are as simple in their low-poly style as they are spectacular at a glance, to the point of making the game seem like a huge moving artbook.
Too bad that this artistic refinement does not correspond to an equally good technical solidity. Despite the use of the excellent Unity engine, every now and then we have found ourselves faced with phenomena of drop in frame rate and interpenetration of polygons; particularly recurrent, for example, the effect of disappearing walls in cases where the camera ends up on us. The worst cases, however, certainly concern real bugs we ran into, which forced us to restart the game section from the last checkpoint.
Vane is definitely a title that should be kept an eye on by lovers of essential, intimate and artistically inspiring indies. But it's hard to recommend it to anyone else. The real missed opportunity of Friend & Foe's adventure was that of not being able to develop the ideas with which he started. The gradual flattening of its own dynamics, combined with the various technical problems, of controls and camera, compromise its solidity and immersion in its fantastic world.
► Vane is an Adventure-Puzzle type game developed and published by Friend & Foe for PlayStation 4, the video game was released on 15/01/2019
