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.