Fez

Ready for adventure?

Fez is a very special game. Not in the sense that it is unique (although it is!), but that there is a very immaculate magic to its atmosphere and subtle nods to the 8- and 16-bit era of video games which you rarely see replicated anywhere else. Even speaking to anybody else who has played it sparks conversations about how insane some of the puzzles are, and also how obtuse and esoteric some of the solutions seem to be; it’s this sort of dialogue that is one of the reasons Fez has already accumulated a fairly large following.

The story begins as Gomez, our protagonist, receives the titular hat which allows him to view the 2-dimensional world in which he lives from 4 separate angles. He is then sent off on a journey to collect the cubes that litter the world and (presumably) correct the cataclysmic event that began it all. And that’s where Fez goes from cute, quirky platformer to completely and thoroughly insane.

Traversing the 2d-made-3d world seems, to the uninitiated, far more difficult than it is in practice: rotate the world, and objects that appear to be far off from one angle may be directly beside you from another. Rotation in itself is the key to solving many of Fez’s puzzles - traversal is a very critical element of success here.

It’s this sort of deceptively complex puzzle design that initially threw me off. I was admittedly a bit disillusioned once I saw how simple the early puzzles were; I assumed that the entire experience would be cut from the same mold. I’ve never been more ecstatic to be proven so genuinely and factually wrong. After my third or fourth hour with Fez, I had come to the conclusion that this game is totally bananas.

Many of the puzzles eventually became crowd-sourcing projects: once players began encountering problems they couldn’t solve, the masses gathered on message boards, IRC chats, and everything in between discussing and attempting to come up with a solution that made sense. It’s very intriguing that a game which evokes such emotion from those who have finished it rarely says a word beyond the player’s companion, Dot, doling out hints at key points of the story, or just being incredibly useless (such as saying “What is this?… I can’t remember” or “Uh…Sorry, I forgot what this is”).

Some of the puzzles had me scratching my head for hours - I resorted to searching for solutions online more than once. The absolutely gleeful thing about it is that doing so did not diminish my sense of accomplishment in the least - simply executing the puzzles and seeing your handiwork set into motion is a terrific feeling. On the other hand, a good handful of them frustrated me more after discovering the solution, because how was I ever expected to figure that stuff out?

The black monolith is a good example of this:

I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THIS IS.

Fez is also a very large game. Upon opening a fully-explored map, a family member was astounded at how staggering the number of individual rooms is. Most rooms hold a secret or treasure, and those that don’t are of direct significance to solving one or more of the puzzles. I found myself coming back to some areas more than a dozen times, trying to uncover the secrets that I hadn’t already found. This is, in itself, a joy: there is no danger, there are no enemies, and falling off a ledge simply plops you back down where you were originally.

The map is incredibly cumbersome to navigate. It’s a complete chore later in the game to find areas that contain puzzles or treasures you haven’t found yet, and areas that aren’t directly connected to the one you highlight completely fade out of view. In addition, I experienced sharp frame-rate drops for several seconds every time I closed the map (as well as rotating the world, sometimes), and on more than one occasion found myself wondering “Well where the hell do I go now?” only to find a room that I had initially passed over while browsing the map screen.

It’s almost tragic that at some point in the journey the platforming becomes trivial; it’s truly fun and unique, and traversing the levels never becomes stale even after one truly realizes the manipulative power over the world that this sort of rotation gimmick provides. Eventually, you get used to the level design and understand almost straight-away what you need to do to progress to a new area even if you have absolutely no clue what you need to do once you’re there. Once accustomed to Fez’s rules of navigation, the player will realize that although the world is very large, and getting around is no hassle.

Fez progresses from interesting (if gimmicky) platformer to metagame-heavy puzzler in a few short hours, but the latter will keep you entertained far longer than the former. Things like hidden QR codes, treasure maps, your Xbox 360’s clock, and your controller's rumble motors all play a key role in collecting all the cubes that are tucked away in this 4-dimensional dreamscape. The experience is very reminiscent of a time before the internet, when you couldn’t just go to Joe Gamer’s blog and find a solution to a puzzle - you had to do all the leg-work on your own. I found it nearly impossible to solve most of the more obscure puzzles without keeping a notebook and a pencil handy, and just having ideas written on paper triggered an “a-ha!” moment. This is where Fez’s true sense of accomplishment comes into play.

Overall, Fez is an aesthetically beautiful game with breathtaking set-pieces and fantastic use of color whose puzzles rely more on brainpower and metagame (literally) than platforming. It was one of the most interesting and unique experiences I have ever had with a game, and is my favorite of the year so far.