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.