Başlangıçta Journey tadında hoş bir yapıma benziyor. Görsel tarzı gerçekten öyle ama sunduğu kamera açısı ve kontrol mekanikleri beni oyunun içerisinde toplam 1 saat tutabildi, gerçekten sıkıldım ki oynarken sıkılıyorsanız karşınızda efsane bir oyun dahi olsa sizlik değil demektir...
It’s very pretty but feels horrible to play. The lack of handholding is made worse by poor camera and controls. It’s also packed with jank like regularly clipping through the environment. I hope the artists got to work on some better projects. Bailed after about 30 minutes
An Ueda-like with ideas and restraint, astounding tech art and color-bending environments.
Eu gostei bastante do jogo!
Após ver uma série de críticas muito negativas, todas baseadas em expectativas altas e performance, eu realmente pensei que esse jogo seria horrível, mas decidi dar uma chance por mim mesmo.
Primeiro tenho que dizer que os visuais lowpoly e as animações parecendo stop-motion, são impressionantes. O jogo é um deleite visual, pelo menos pra mim.
Em termos de narrativa, não achei grandes coisas, mas me senti mais fisgado e envolvido do que em GRIS, ABZU, Journey, etc, tem algo que me atraiu muito nesse jogo.
Sobre os bugs e os checkpoints que foram uma reclamação constante durante o lançamento, devo dizer que são reclamações um pouco histéricas, ou foram arrumados. O jogo tem checkpoints o suficiente pra mim e tive apenas um momento onde a inteligência artificial dos minions bugou e eu tive que reiniciar o checkpoint, nada doloroso.
A gameplay não apresenta nada inovador, se você já jogou algum dos jogos que eu já citei e também INSIDE e Little Nightmares, você sabe mais ou menos o que está por vir. A resolução de alguns puzzles são um pouco obtusas, mas é interessante como fui naturalmente guiado a resolvê-las sem muita dificuldade, é como se minhas experiências anteriores com esses jogos me guiassem.
Eu realmente gostei de Vane.
Após ver uma série de críticas muito negativas, todas baseadas em expectativas altas e performance, eu realmente pensei que esse jogo seria horrível, mas decidi dar uma chance por mim mesmo.
Primeiro tenho que dizer que os visuais lowpoly e as animações parecendo stop-motion, são impressionantes. O jogo é um deleite visual, pelo menos pra mim.
Em termos de narrativa, não achei grandes coisas, mas me senti mais fisgado e envolvido do que em GRIS, ABZU, Journey, etc, tem algo que me atraiu muito nesse jogo.
Sobre os bugs e os checkpoints que foram uma reclamação constante durante o lançamento, devo dizer que são reclamações um pouco histéricas, ou foram arrumados. O jogo tem checkpoints o suficiente pra mim e tive apenas um momento onde a inteligência artificial dos minions bugou e eu tive que reiniciar o checkpoint, nada doloroso.
A gameplay não apresenta nada inovador, se você já jogou algum dos jogos que eu já citei e também INSIDE e Little Nightmares, você sabe mais ou menos o que está por vir. A resolução de alguns puzzles são um pouco obtusas, mas é interessante como fui naturalmente guiado a resolvê-las sem muita dificuldade, é como se minhas experiências anteriores com esses jogos me guiassem.
Eu realmente gostei de Vane.
Sony is well known for their “artsy-fartsy” games that started way back on the PS1 with titles such as Intelligent Qube and Vib-Ribbon. Later games such as echochrome and Unfinished Swan pushed this further as indie-friendly games that are all about art and vision rather than sales. Vane is another game in this…vain…ha! It sadly misses the mark on what these other art house games do.
You play as a girl who can turn into a crow and you start out flying around a valley and the direction of what to do is unclear just like the story itself. Most of these artsy games have some clear story through visual or audio representation and by the end, you get the message, but Vane doesn’t have either of these. We open up with the girl delivering a gold something to a large crow elder in a storm and she gets shunned away and gets eaten by the storm. As we fly around as the crow we are attracted to shiny objects in the distance on windmills and these release gold leaves and more crows follow you to the centerpiece windmill that requires enough crows to release a gold ball.
As this ball is released you are taken prisoner and somehow you must free more crows and the gold stuff turn you into a little girl that can walk around. This second area is the last time you will use your flying skills as the entire back half of the game sees you just walking around and rolling a giant gold ball around. So that’s the entirety of the game. There’s no point to it all and the ending doesn’t answer anything either. There are a few push/pull puzzles with the giant ball as you need to find more girls to use your scream powers to rewind time in a large enough area to recreate bridges. After that it’s more stuff with the gold and no explanation as to what it’s used for, who are these crow elders, why are we bringing this gold ball to the top of a tower? Nothing, there’s no investment for the 2 hours of your life you will never get back.
If you’re going to do an artsy game at least give us a story at the bare minimum. Journey did this wonderfully and was memorable because of the visuals, music, and visual story it told. The problems don’t end there with Vane however, there are glitches and bugs that require restarts such as physics issues in which I would get stuck on something or the giant gold ball would roll in the wrong direction and not be retrievable. One time my crow wouldn’t transform into a girl and required a manual restart.
At least the visuals are nice with an abstract fractal typesetting with some great lighting and well-designed characters, but it’s all for naught if there’s nothing to care about in the game. Vane is a sadly missed opportunity with too much emphasis on visuals and less on something the player needs to strive for. We know these girls are desperate to save something, but what? It’s never clear and not really worth the time to play through.
You play as a girl who can turn into a crow and you start out flying around a valley and the direction of what to do is unclear just like the story itself. Most of these artsy games have some clear story through visual or audio representation and by the end, you get the message, but Vane doesn’t have either of these. We open up with the girl delivering a gold something to a large crow elder in a storm and she gets shunned away and gets eaten by the storm. As we fly around as the crow we are attracted to shiny objects in the distance on windmills and these release gold leaves and more crows follow you to the centerpiece windmill that requires enough crows to release a gold ball.
As this ball is released you are taken prisoner and somehow you must free more crows and the gold stuff turn you into a little girl that can walk around. This second area is the last time you will use your flying skills as the entire back half of the game sees you just walking around and rolling a giant gold ball around. So that’s the entirety of the game. There’s no point to it all and the ending doesn’t answer anything either. There are a few push/pull puzzles with the giant ball as you need to find more girls to use your scream powers to rewind time in a large enough area to recreate bridges. After that it’s more stuff with the gold and no explanation as to what it’s used for, who are these crow elders, why are we bringing this gold ball to the top of a tower? Nothing, there’s no investment for the 2 hours of your life you will never get back.
If you’re going to do an artsy game at least give us a story at the bare minimum. Journey did this wonderfully and was memorable because of the visuals, music, and visual story it told. The problems don’t end there with Vane however, there are glitches and bugs that require restarts such as physics issues in which I would get stuck on something or the giant gold ball would roll in the wrong direction and not be retrievable. One time my crow wouldn’t transform into a girl and required a manual restart.
At least the visuals are nice with an abstract fractal typesetting with some great lighting and well-designed characters, but it’s all for naught if there’s nothing to care about in the game. Vane is a sadly missed opportunity with too much emphasis on visuals and less on something the player needs to strive for. We know these girls are desperate to save something, but what? It’s never clear and not really worth the time to play through.
If Vane were to be in its entirety its opening act fully fleshed out - I'd have a new favourite game. An hour of pottering over a vast pearlescant desert where what remains of a civilisation that hasn't been devoured by the earth's crust has the gentle presence of a great elder, sleepily telling their tale. Pulled in different directions by faint shimmers of glass and specks of stone in the distance - as a crow, that's all the provocation to explore you need in this mercifully waypoint-free world. It felt like a game that was finally learning the right lessons from Thatgamecompany and Team Ico; the flatly-shaded polygonal artstyle age-wearing the details and lending a sense of greater mystery to the windswept world, of which the player must take great care and attention in navigating because it's grand architects weren't designing a platformer game stage to collect coins in. To be present is to be prayerful.
The latter chapters give some distinctly diminishing returns as their gameplay shifts to more functionally grounded puzzlesolving. Not without their standout moments, it was therepeutic to scream at an orb.
Look at the way it displaces polygons for a timelapse effect!! This world shakes and breaks as you poke and meander, its wonderful stop-motion environmental unbuilding quirks lend Vane the feeling of a world barely held together by its 3D-printed infill. Not to make excuses for the game, but this was a case where I didn't mind the handful of glitches I encountered during my playthrough. In a game that takes great pleasure in ripping itself to shreds, veering itself wildly off course in a kind of implicit panic, I'd almost expect its rulebook to skip a page or two in the fray. Sometimes you clip out of the world, crash your console, and you just have to think "cool".
Like all the best art, Vane can be brilliant and subversive and confusing and frustrating. Definitely, the best of the Flower/Journey derivatives because it genuinely feels like it wants to carry their legacy like a true apprentice - but the game is sadly just too disjointed for it to stick the landing for me.
The latter chapters give some distinctly diminishing returns as their gameplay shifts to more functionally grounded puzzlesolving. Not without their standout moments, it was therepeutic to scream at an orb.
Look at the way it displaces polygons for a timelapse effect!! This world shakes and breaks as you poke and meander, its wonderful stop-motion environmental unbuilding quirks lend Vane the feeling of a world barely held together by its 3D-printed infill. Not to make excuses for the game, but this was a case where I didn't mind the handful of glitches I encountered during my playthrough. In a game that takes great pleasure in ripping itself to shreds, veering itself wildly off course in a kind of implicit panic, I'd almost expect its rulebook to skip a page or two in the fray. Sometimes you clip out of the world, crash your console, and you just have to think "cool".
Like all the best art, Vane can be brilliant and subversive and confusing and frustrating. Definitely, the best of the Flower/Journey derivatives because it genuinely feels like it wants to carry their legacy like a true apprentice - but the game is sadly just too disjointed for it to stick the landing for me.
Se podria decir que nuestra amiga Vanesa "la Vane" intenta hacer cosas pero bah muy sin más eh
A shell, a shimmer ; I wish I could call it masterpiece, but the gameplay doesn't hold.
Feels twice as long as it is because of how annoying it is to play.
I don't know what I'm doing, my thumb hurts from mashing A to fly, and the camera has spazzed out on me a few times. Very unpleasant experience. Even the action-packed opening couldn't keep me playing to figure out wtf was going on
VANE is so cool as a touchpoint for talking about art and so boring as a commercial product. If ever a game needed a director’s commentary, it was this one, as its technical intricacies far outshine its played experience.
Gaming has already decided there is a place for making games dedicated to a single idea that happens to feature gameplay. Games where environment interaction is so minimal as to have a screensaver mode. There is value in these experiences. Stripped of waypoints, checklists, or a HUD of any kind, these art exhibit games elevate the novelty of interactivity from the way it is taken for granted in mainstream, stuffed-to-the-gills experiences.
In that sense, VANE functions like an arthouse film in showing you the conventions of a medium used towards different goals. Like the first Super Mario Galaxy, VANE has a camera with cat-like inclinations as to how much it will acknowledge your suggestions. Super Mario Galaxy’s camera endeavored to provide a line of sight between you, Mario, and his next jumping point. VANE’s camera instead orients itself to show the player character and the environment in some contextual awareness of photography’s rule of thirds. With no sense of danger, efficiency for movement and clarity of directional input need not be priorities. You know well enough where you’re going to get there, so framing the scenery to maintain atmosphere can claim priority without hampering playability.
I found this camera so fascinating because it felt like an evolution of the fixed camera set pieces found in PS1 era horror games. Walking through a doorway heavily orients the camera, but it can still be rotated. However, the axis of rotation is not centered around the player character. The camera axis can be centered to the side of a room’s interior corner, maintaining a vision for how a wall frames a scene while still allowing for player input. The player character was visible, but never centered at a consistent size. All of these axes of rotation were hand-placed, and naturally transition between each other. It's a convention so foreign to how gaming has evolved it's impossible for me to determine how effectively VANE uses it.
If you care at all how VANE is to play, it is split between crow simulator and “action adventure” puzzle solving. As a crow simulator, VANE is great. You can fly, you can caw. You can land on sculptures, you can hop around. The world is filled with enticingly shiny shinies. As a game with puzzles, it is nigh incomprehensible. It explains nothing, and just as often has camera angles selected for mood as it does to nudge the player towards the direction of progress.
VANE’s main magic trick is to take advantage of its intentionally low-poly look to rattle reality in stylish ways. Magic spheres send waves of force that make every triangle in the level jump and pulse. Objects have their triangles flutter apart and reassemble into different shapes. Animations take on a stop-motion quality, where stairways and structures disintegrate and rebuild like a time lapse video of a construction site. The game deftly balances when to play with the framerate of different objects and when to use different animation styles to maintain the understanding that everything is intentional.
Ultimately, VANE feels like a proof of concept. Its entire identity feels like nuggets of game ideas that have existed in spirit as building blocks elsewhere. Using a magic ball to shift its surrounding environment through time, in real time, is very cool - but VANE does not show how cool it could be. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword used this concept as a central mechanic in a couple of its dungeons. Though the difference between past and present in Skyward Sword was binary, that game already expanded upon the concept enough to have puzzles requiring awareness of unseen 3D space. While VANE introduces a visual gradient to the mechanic, the core is nothing more than a way to progress through linear levels.
I feel what VANE lacks is a stronger grounding into the emotional space it wants to invoke. Its world, gameplay objectives, and characters are all so abstracted they can barely muster more than innate curiosity. But curiosity is the weakest form of emotional investment, as it can easily break down into frustration or boredom without more context to turn a vague feeling into a concrete question that can be answered. In that sense, VANE’s movement speed is too slow, its soundtrack too sparsely used, its visuals too unrelatable to prevent the player from realizing how much time is spent doing minimal inputs while waiting for a character to get … somewhere, when half the time that somewhere is a mystery.
In my review scale, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game, and I feel I am awarding VANE that score based on my favorable, compressed memories rather than my actual time playing it. In the way uneven writing inspires fan fiction, VANE has moments of gameplay with just enough inspiration to imagine a better game like it. I’m guessing VANE did not sell well, (since the game’s website has expired), and given its unfavorable price to duration ratio, I’m not surprised. Of the four letter, all caps arthouse games I’ve played this year, (ABZÛ, GRIS), VANE is the one I’ve had the least pleasant time playing, but had the most interesting thoughts about afterwards. So in the long run, I guess it wins.
That title logo is fantastic.
Gaming has already decided there is a place for making games dedicated to a single idea that happens to feature gameplay. Games where environment interaction is so minimal as to have a screensaver mode. There is value in these experiences. Stripped of waypoints, checklists, or a HUD of any kind, these art exhibit games elevate the novelty of interactivity from the way it is taken for granted in mainstream, stuffed-to-the-gills experiences.
In that sense, VANE functions like an arthouse film in showing you the conventions of a medium used towards different goals. Like the first Super Mario Galaxy, VANE has a camera with cat-like inclinations as to how much it will acknowledge your suggestions. Super Mario Galaxy’s camera endeavored to provide a line of sight between you, Mario, and his next jumping point. VANE’s camera instead orients itself to show the player character and the environment in some contextual awareness of photography’s rule of thirds. With no sense of danger, efficiency for movement and clarity of directional input need not be priorities. You know well enough where you’re going to get there, so framing the scenery to maintain atmosphere can claim priority without hampering playability.
I found this camera so fascinating because it felt like an evolution of the fixed camera set pieces found in PS1 era horror games. Walking through a doorway heavily orients the camera, but it can still be rotated. However, the axis of rotation is not centered around the player character. The camera axis can be centered to the side of a room’s interior corner, maintaining a vision for how a wall frames a scene while still allowing for player input. The player character was visible, but never centered at a consistent size. All of these axes of rotation were hand-placed, and naturally transition between each other. It's a convention so foreign to how gaming has evolved it's impossible for me to determine how effectively VANE uses it.
If you care at all how VANE is to play, it is split between crow simulator and “action adventure” puzzle solving. As a crow simulator, VANE is great. You can fly, you can caw. You can land on sculptures, you can hop around. The world is filled with enticingly shiny shinies. As a game with puzzles, it is nigh incomprehensible. It explains nothing, and just as often has camera angles selected for mood as it does to nudge the player towards the direction of progress.
VANE’s main magic trick is to take advantage of its intentionally low-poly look to rattle reality in stylish ways. Magic spheres send waves of force that make every triangle in the level jump and pulse. Objects have their triangles flutter apart and reassemble into different shapes. Animations take on a stop-motion quality, where stairways and structures disintegrate and rebuild like a time lapse video of a construction site. The game deftly balances when to play with the framerate of different objects and when to use different animation styles to maintain the understanding that everything is intentional.
Ultimately, VANE feels like a proof of concept. Its entire identity feels like nuggets of game ideas that have existed in spirit as building blocks elsewhere. Using a magic ball to shift its surrounding environment through time, in real time, is very cool - but VANE does not show how cool it could be. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword used this concept as a central mechanic in a couple of its dungeons. Though the difference between past and present in Skyward Sword was binary, that game already expanded upon the concept enough to have puzzles requiring awareness of unseen 3D space. While VANE introduces a visual gradient to the mechanic, the core is nothing more than a way to progress through linear levels.
I feel what VANE lacks is a stronger grounding into the emotional space it wants to invoke. Its world, gameplay objectives, and characters are all so abstracted they can barely muster more than innate curiosity. But curiosity is the weakest form of emotional investment, as it can easily break down into frustration or boredom without more context to turn a vague feeling into a concrete question that can be answered. In that sense, VANE’s movement speed is too slow, its soundtrack too sparsely used, its visuals too unrelatable to prevent the player from realizing how much time is spent doing minimal inputs while waiting for a character to get … somewhere, when half the time that somewhere is a mystery.
In my review scale, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game, and I feel I am awarding VANE that score based on my favorable, compressed memories rather than my actual time playing it. In the way uneven writing inspires fan fiction, VANE has moments of gameplay with just enough inspiration to imagine a better game like it. I’m guessing VANE did not sell well, (since the game’s website has expired), and given its unfavorable price to duration ratio, I’m not surprised. Of the four letter, all caps arthouse games I’ve played this year, (ABZÛ, GRIS), VANE is the one I’ve had the least pleasant time playing, but had the most interesting thoughts about afterwards. So in the long run, I guess it wins.
Like moths to a flame I keep feeling drawn to this game, despite it's many shortcomings and lack of deeper emotional narrative like it's obvious inspirations. Comparing it to those, it seems like Vane misses the point of games like ICO, Shadow of Colossus and Journey, but that doesn't mean it's without it's own merits, either.
You don't have to look far to see a game that's visually so stark and unique in it's ability to tear itself apart, that I found myself chuckling as I suddenly saw typical Z-fighting in this game servicing the art style, rather than ruin it. The distorted, synth-y sound design and music brings the whole aesthetic of this game together very nicely, and it's noteworthy how well both sound and visuals are tuned to each other. Thomas Lilja's work on the Soundtrack is playing on my sound system more than I like to admit.
I'm conflicted how I feel about the gameplay in the middle third of Vane, as it seems to muddle it's themes a little, but that could as well be intentional. My personal favorite moments have always been the desert in the beginning, and recently the ascension in the tower. I only recently found out that you could beat the other children in their race to each door, and found myself instantly connecting a few more dots to the picture this game seemingly wants to draw. On the flipside is rolling the ball around in the middle third. It's visually fascinating, yes, but also not very engaging in an either emotional, nor intellectual manner, though - like I said in the beginning - this might have also been intentional.
Calling Vane a "puzzle plattformer" or "walking simulator" would be both misleading or reductive, as it's undeniably something that tries to be itself first and foremost, without conforming to any kind of pre-defined genre. That, it's creative intent, the picture it tries to paint and the brilliant audiovisual realization make this more of a work of art to me than most other video games.
It's a shame then, that Vane get's slept on so much.
You don't have to look far to see a game that's visually so stark and unique in it's ability to tear itself apart, that I found myself chuckling as I suddenly saw typical Z-fighting in this game servicing the art style, rather than ruin it. The distorted, synth-y sound design and music brings the whole aesthetic of this game together very nicely, and it's noteworthy how well both sound and visuals are tuned to each other. Thomas Lilja's work on the Soundtrack is playing on my sound system more than I like to admit.
I'm conflicted how I feel about the gameplay in the middle third of Vane, as it seems to muddle it's themes a little, but that could as well be intentional. My personal favorite moments have always been the desert in the beginning, and recently the ascension in the tower. I only recently found out that you could beat the other children in their race to each door, and found myself instantly connecting a few more dots to the picture this game seemingly wants to draw. On the flipside is rolling the ball around in the middle third. It's visually fascinating, yes, but also not very engaging in an either emotional, nor intellectual manner, though - like I said in the beginning - this might have also been intentional.
Calling Vane a "puzzle plattformer" or "walking simulator" would be both misleading or reductive, as it's undeniably something that tries to be itself first and foremost, without conforming to any kind of pre-defined genre. That, it's creative intent, the picture it tries to paint and the brilliant audiovisual realization make this more of a work of art to me than most other video games.
It's a shame then, that Vane get's slept on so much.
when it's done right, the subgenre of "short, arty, atmospheric exploration game driven by abstract storytelling" has made for some of my favorite games ever, in titles like Journey, ABZU, and Gris.
Vane is definitely not that subgenre done right. It delivers on the visuals and art direction, at least, but its horribly clunky controls, frustratingly unclear objectives, and lack of checkpoints for already badly-controlling platforming segments make it impossible to recommend at all but the steepest of discounts.
Vane is definitely not that subgenre done right. It delivers on the visuals and art direction, at least, but its horribly clunky controls, frustratingly unclear objectives, and lack of checkpoints for already badly-controlling platforming segments make it impossible to recommend at all but the steepest of discounts.
A pretty, peaceful adventure game where you're a bird. Except the parts where you're not a bird, which are terrible.
Also, the game was released in such a buggy state that I thought the frequent crashes were going to brick my PS4. Maybe they've patched it? If so, I may give it another chance some day.
Also, the game was released in such a buggy state that I thought the frequent crashes were going to brick my PS4. Maybe they've patched it? If so, I may give it another chance some day.
A silent soliloquy about time.
Which, I guess ironically, goes on for a bit too long. It's understandably in the way it is because the pace is directed to be one of slow mysterious evolution but the core I think isn't deep enough in scope to make up for it. I'm sure some people will feel things, but I did not, and if anything I felt a lack of emotion that matched the very desolate areas and impending destruction of what's left. Which led to long crawls rather than beautiful mystifying exposure that I suppose I'm meant to feel, with what is strong synth bass boosts but complete almost npc reactions on my face.
Not for me I suppose, but to be a bit cynical, I think Passage had a stronger push to it and only took 8 minutes.
Which, I guess ironically, goes on for a bit too long. It's understandably in the way it is because the pace is directed to be one of slow mysterious evolution but the core I think isn't deep enough in scope to make up for it. I'm sure some people will feel things, but I did not, and if anything I felt a lack of emotion that matched the very desolate areas and impending destruction of what's left. Which led to long crawls rather than beautiful mystifying exposure that I suppose I'm meant to feel, with what is strong synth bass boosts but complete almost npc reactions on my face.
Not for me I suppose, but to be a bit cynical, I think Passage had a stronger push to it and only took 8 minutes.
I thought this was stunning. totally singular art style that feels like a mix between low poly 3d, palette knife painting, and stop motion animation. The moody glitch-synth score is a bold accompaniment to the visuals--feels like playing a pre-historical oneohtrix music video. Infinitely more captivating and mysterious than any of its post-journey peers (cough cough RIME, cough cough ABZU) that overzealously dole out their rote setpieces and discoveries with an almost algorithmic precision. Vane is still a very "directed" game with clear design choices made to steer players toward specific goals, but those guiding seams are vague and restrained, making the world feel like a vast, mournful place that exists for its own reasons as opposed to a player playground where every element is a rote guidepost to lead you to the next intended zone. I personally didn't find the slow speed of the child avatar to be "clunky" or "bad design"--the scenic imagery in the game more than warrants prolonged admiration and reflection. The slow movement came across as a completely justifiable (and effective!) design choice for a game exploring time in such disquieting, vast, and lovely ways. low key frustrating that we exist in a cultural gaming landscape that won't tolerate game mechanics of disempowerment and humility for an only 3 hour runtime in something THIS gorgeous and thoughtful.