Vane

What it is

Vane opens with a free-spirited bird gliding across a vast, ruined desert, before a strange golden dust transforms it into a determined young child, setting off a wordless chain of events that reshapes the surrounding world. Developed by Friend & Foe Games — a studio founded by former Team Ico developers — and published alongside Gamera Game, it draws deliberate inspiration from titles like Journey, Shadow of the Colossus and ABZU, telling its story entirely through action, environment and atmosphere rather than dialogue. It released on 22 July 2019 at NZD 23.99, after a long, closely- watched development first announced at Tokyo Game Show in 2014.

Its review corpus, while smaller than most titles this lane covers at 102 English reviews, sits at a genuine Mostly Positive 77.5% (79 to 23), and the reviews themselves are detailed and substantive enough on both sides to support a full, evidence-based verdict despite the smaller sample.

A visual and atmospheric achievement that earns near-unanimous praise

Almost without exception, this corpus agrees on Vane's presentation. "Astonishingly beautiful artistic direction and stunning audio," writes one reviewer, even while delivering an overall negative verdict on the game's technical execution. A separate reviewer describes genuinely pausing mid-playthrough just to take in the scenery: "there's vistas there that are so good, I regularly pause just to admire them," praising the game's "very clever visual play on polygons." A third reviewer situates the game directly within its clear lineage: "if Vane were to be in its entirety its opening act fully fleshed out — I'd have a new favourite game," describing "an hour of pottering over a vast pearlescent desert" with real, unscripted freedom to choose a path toward distant landmarks.

Widely and specifically documented broken controls

Set against that visual praise, this corpus's dominant, most consistent complaint concerns basic playability. "The game is straight up unplayable, right from the start the camera moves on its own, left and right, zooming out/in while going through textures and geometry. Trying to control it back just makes it worse," writes one detailed reviewer. A separate reviewer independently corroborates the identical failure mode: "the controls are SHOCKINGLY bad. The camera movement is even worse. I can't see where I'm going at key moments where I need to do a timed jump." A third reviewer frames the broader disappointment precisely: "astonishingly beautiful artistic direction and stunning audio married to some of the most shockingly poor technical execution I have ever encountered in a fully released game." That's an unusually consistent, specific pattern across independent reviews — not vague "the controls take getting used to" complaints, but repeated, near-identical descriptions of a camera that actively fights the player during exploration and platforming.

Unpatched gamepad issues despite a developer promise

A separate, more specific complaint concerns controller support directly. "Gamepad issues are still not patched. Devs promised right after release over a month ago to fix this. Nothing happened, no news either," writes one detailed reviewer, a concrete, checkable claim about an unfulfilled developer commitment rather than a general complaint about difficulty. Another reviewer corroborates the practical impact: "its not game pad friendly on pc so im using a mouse and keys which I hate," despite the game's design clearly favoring a controller for its exploration-and-flight-based gameplay. A separate reviewer describes the specific frustration of getting genuinely stuck as a direct result of the movement problems: "the character would actually stop moving in mid-air and just tread water" at moments requiring precise platforming, turning what should be a meditative flying sequence into a repeated source of confusion about whether the game itself was malfunctioning.

A fair, nuanced middle ground

Several detailed reviewers resist an all-or-nothing framing. "Please stop making games so hard to review," writes one reviewer, a self-described fan of walking sims who still found real ambiguity in how to rate Vane's mix of genuine atmosphere and real friction. A separate reviewer states a similar hesitation directly: "I kinda don't recommend this game to most people, but I also didn't want to give this a negative rating as I was hoping the studio would go on to do other really creative projects" — a generous, forward-looking framing distinct from either enthusiastic recommendation or outright dismissal. That kind of ambivalence runs through a meaningful share of this corpus, suggesting Vane's central tension — genuine artistic achievement paired with genuine technical failure — doesn't resolve cleanly for many players who experience both at once.

What the achievement data confirms

Vane's achievement curve shows a notably low ceiling even at the very first meaningful milestone — the top achievement sits at just 43%, falling quickly through the 15-25% range for act-completion milestones and down to single digits for the game's alternate endings and hardest vista-discovery achievements. That's consistent with a short game (roughly two hours per multiple reviewers) that a real share of buyers still don't finish, plausibly tied directly to the control and camera friction documented throughout this corpus rather than simple lack of interest in a compact experience.

Verdict

Vane achieves something genuinely rare in its visual and atmospheric ambition, carrying real lineage from some of gaming's most respected exploration-adventure touchstones, and that achievement is rarely disputed even by its harshest critics. But a large, detailed and independently corroborated share of its own reviewers document broken or deeply awkward camera and movement controls that actively undermine the exploration the entire experience depends on, compounded by an unpatched gamepad issue the developers reportedly promised — and failed — to fix. Worth experiencing for its artistry on a discount, with real patience required for the technical execution underneath it.