Post Script
How Vane illustrates the perils of giving players too much rope (contains spoilers)
These days, it’s not uncommon to receive an email from a PR while reviewing a game, informing us of a newly released patch – at which point we cross our fingers that it’s only going to wipe out bugs rather than our current progress. But it was a surprise to see one for Vane accompanied by a guide put together by the developer. Had we not already been an hour or so into the game, alarm bells would have started ringing. This was, after all, a game we’d been told should take between three and five hours to finish. Ultimately, we only referred to it once, when we were unsure whether we’d gone wrong or the game had – and sure enough, it turned out the problem was Vane’s. But as we continued playing, it became increasingly clear why the PR felt a guide was necessary.
Vane is the latest example of a prevailing trend in games. In response to the tutorialheavy approach of many modern blockbusters, today’s developers seem to have collectively decided that players don’t need their hands held quite so tightly. Big-budget games are increasingly letting players turn off HUDs and minimaps, encouraging us to use our initiative and natural curiosity to find our next objective. Some indies have taken it further: consider Capy’s Below, and its bullish insistence on giving almost nothing away.
Friend & Foe favours the latter approach – up to a point, at least. Vane doesn’t have a HUD, or text of any kind. There’s no tutorial whatsoever. You’re simply dropped into the world and invited to figure things out for yourself. The controls are relegated to the pause menu and never explained. In theory it’s a good idea: you explore, experiment and discover by doing.
This kind of approach works so long as the player has an overarching goal, or else something to naturally draw the eye. Think of Journey, where your ultimate destination is often in sight, and where its camera darts around a new environment to suggest an exit or possible route forward. Or The Last Guardian’s elegant puzzles, which despite your inelegant assistant, establish a clear visual language so progress feels organic without the player being spoon-fed solutions.
If Vane’s inspirations are obvious, they do have a positive influence in places. The first area has a focal point in the form of a large windmill. When you’re not wrestling with the camera, you’ll spot small groups of birds in the distance, gathering around windsocks that must be dislodged so they can flock toward the main structure. Eventually, you have enough to weigh down the vanes to dislodge an orb, which triggers your transformation. In the next area, there’s a variant on a similar theme, with the birds weighing down another mechanism: a logical progression.
Yet its approach is inconsistent. Occasionally, it offers the worst kind of help: a button prompt when it’s not required. In a room with three obvious levers, we don’t need to be told that pressing circle will let us pull them. By contrast, in the third area, you’re left to push a glowing ball slowly around with no apparent goal. When rolling it into position to transform nearby scenery into steps and a bridge, there’s no suggestion you don’t have the tools for the job. It’s only after spending a while scouring the environment that you’ll find more groups of children sitting near smaller, dormant orbs. And there’s simply no precedent for what follows: that calling them to join the throng will increase the range of the larger orb’s transformative powers.
The best games don’t need to explicitly tell us where to go or what to do because their worlds are designed to subconsciously guide us, however much we push against the edges. As long as that’s true, we’re happy for developers to continue removing the training wheels. But Vane should serve as a warning that there can be such a thing as too much freedom – and that a hurriedly emailed walkthrough is hardly the ideal solution.