Ico and Journey-Inspired ‘Vane’ Release Trailer Reveals Exclusive PS4 Launch in January

After soaring around various stages of development for more than four years, Friend & Foe’s Ico and Journey-inspired hallucinatory adventure Vane will finally be landing on the PlayStation 4 on January 15 for $24.99. As of today, the game’s available for pre-order on the PlayStation Store, and pre-ordering gets you a nice dynamic Vane theme.

Set in a ruined desert, Vane is an exploratory journey, where players will transform between bird and child form to unravel mysteries and create a path forward through an expansive landscape filled with ominous caves, mysterious machinery, and harrowing storms. The desert that players will explore isn’t just an ordinary, dry world,  however — it’s a mythical wasteland that reacts to players passing through as it continuously evolves and builds into something different. I can imagine that the transformation and world-changing mechanics will lead to plenty of tricky, fun, exploratory moments, and both mechanics look absolutely interesting, to say the least.

The development team behind Vane, the Tokyo-based expat studio Friend & Foe, is a team with AAA experience spanning titles like The Last Guardian (one of the most underappreciated games, in my opinion), Killzone, Battlefield 3, and Bionic Commando. Friend & Foe developed Vane with the conviction that players should find their own path through the world.

Getting lost in Vane is what I’ll be doing, for sure, and based off of the fact that it’ll have an all-original brooding synth soundtrack, I’m sure I’ll be fully immersed in Vane’s intriguing, minimalistic world. In a press release, the developer went into more detail about what they wanted to achieve with the overall look and feel of Vane:

“With Vane, we wanted to make a game that emphasizes mood and atmosphere over more conventional mechanics,” said Rasmus Deguchi, Art Director at Friend & Foe. “While loosely inspired by titles like Journey and Ico, we wanted to make something different. A little more unsettling. A little more surprising. A little more primal.”

Walk and soar through a bit of Vane with the trailer and screenshots below: 

Author’s Take: Since Journey, ICO, and The Last Guardian are some of my favorite “artsy” games, I’m looking forward to exploring all that Vane has to offer.