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Exploratory adventure 'Vane' is now available on Steam
Several months after the PS4 launch, the trippy adventure game Vane is ready for the PC crowd. Friend & Foe has launched the title on Steam for $20, with the soundtrack available separately through Steam and Bandcamp for $7. It preserves the exploration-driven gameplay where you shift between bird and child forms to traverse a mysterious world and discover your destiny. The computer version reflects all the PS4 updates so far, including "more forgiving" checkpoints.
Excited and exhausted: The hours before the launch of 'Vane'
By the time our Skype call connects and Matt Smith says hello, it's already January 15th at the Friend & Foe offices in Tokyo. After nearly five years of development and public promises, his studio's first original game, Vane, is out across Europe and Asia. It'll go live in the US in about six hours. "[I'm] excited, really excited, exhausted, and kind of nervous as well," Smith said. "I think those are the main three things, but it's just -- the thing is, it's kind of hard also to turn away from it. I've got other things I should probably turn my life back to, but there's this draw to continually check Twitter, even though there's nothing interesting, nothing we need to look at there, and we can probably afford to leave it alone for a couple of days -- and probably should, just to recharge our batteries. So I'm really nervous and I really want to make sure everything goes well, so I'm sort of obsessively tracking things and checking things."
Former Last Guardian devs' teaser trailer is so Vane
Friend and Foe Games offered a teaser trailer for one of its two introductory games this week, Vane. The Tokyo Game Show 2014 trailer shows the game's desert-and-ruins environment, following a bird in flight before observing a shadowy sprinting child. The team of five at Friend and Foe Games includes credits on Team Ico's The Last Guardian, Bionic Commando, Battlefield 3 and the Killzone series. Head past the break to check out the trailer. Announced in June, the game's youthful character has an "odd ability" and is stuck in a "strange land." While the trailer doesn't shed any light on Vane's setting other than it being prone to severe lightning strikes, the child does appear to leap off a platform and morph into a bird near the end of the video. Vane is in development for PC with other consoles to follow and does not currently have a release date. [Image: Friend and Foe Games]
Windswept deserts, 80s buddy cops from ex-Team Ico devs
A group of five game industry veterans, including two former The Last Guardian developers, have founded Friend & Foe, an independent studio in Tokyo. Friend & Foe is working on two games in parallel, Vane and Dangerous Men. Vane is the more fleshed-out project, complete with a flurry of images and gifs depicting a windswept desert landscape, and a polygonal, shadowy child running alongside ruins, lightning and a freaky weather vane. The child has an "odd ability," Friend & Foe says: "Vane is a single-player game being developed by a few ex-members of The Last Guardian team. The game focuses on unraveling the mysteries of an unknown land via exploration, puzzle-solving and other features yet to be revealed, in an atmospheric and powerful setting." Dangerous Men takes a different tack – it's an action-arcade game based on 1980s buddy-cop movies. Vane is due out for PC first with other platforms to follow, and Dangerous Men doesn't have any specified platforms. Each is due out "when it's done." Friend & Foe is composed of Ivar Dahlberg, Rasmus Deguchi, Rui Guerreiro, Thomas Lilja and Victor Santaquiteria. Deguchi and Guerreiro are the former Team Ico duo, while the rest have a rich history in AAA game development, including work on Bionic Commando, Battlefield 3 and Killzone. [Image: Friend & Foe]
