Fez

I enjoyed Fez quite a bit. I spent 19 hours playing it (according to Steam), mostly on my MacBook in my office in between meetings. Playing it in small chunks worked well; at least for the first 10-12 hours it always left me wanting to come back for more. But after a certain point I was only continuing to play out of a sense of obligation, and I began to realize that the game has serious problems with the way the puzzles are presented and integrated with the gameplay.

This review contains massive SPOILERS. I don't think I can articulate the problems I had with Fez without going into details about some of the puzzles. If you don't want to be spoiled, stop reading now.

I played through the game in three phases:

• collecting the first 32+ cubes via platforming and solving the easier puzzles.
• collecting more anti-cubes by solving the harder puzzles.
• finishing the hardest puzzles by looking up hints or outright solutions.

I had a lot of fun with the game through phase 1 and most of phase 2. It runs well on my Mac with the exception of a few relatively small frame-rate problems. It looks great; I loved the rotation mechanic. I found to the basic platforming pretty good, in that it responded to my inputs quickly (though I found the jumping to be a bit floaty). I was getting satisfaction out of solving the puzzles.

But as I got closer to 100% completion* I started to feel unsatisfied.

After the initial intellectual satisfaction of figuring out the tetromino code, I began to wonder how entering a keyboard code to solve a puzzle fit in with the core platforming mechanics.

After the thrill of decoding the alphabet, I found that it only really served to reveal another puzzle that was virtually impossible to solve anyway.

And after solving a few LT/RT rotation puzzles by pure random chance (including one of the heart pieces), I started to fear that the developers had not really thought through the way easier puzzles can teach the player how to solve harder ones. That instead, they were just throwing in anything they could think of that was sort of related to their basic theme of a higher-dimensional world projected to 2D.

The really hard puzzles basically confirmed my fears.

First, the tuning fork puzzles. These were clearly not meant to be among the hardest puzzles in the game--the XBox version apparently gives a very clear signal about what you are supposed to do. The Mac version, however, does not. I actually think it would have been an easy fix: instead of Dot's hint that she can "feel the power", have her say she can "hear the power". But for whatever reason no such change was made, and the puzzle was impossible unless I was wearing headphones and had the volume turned way up.

Second, the METATRON puzzle. I did not solve it by myself. I suppose it is possible to get the answer to the question--the owls give some hints that could lead an intrepid Googler to "Metatron's Cube", as I discovered after the fact--but even then I would never have thought to spell it out rotated 90 degrees and then do two right rotations to complete it. I assumed that, like Japanese or even the game's own tetromino codes, the alphabet would go left-to-right if top-to-bottom/right-to-left was not possible. There is simply nothing in the game that provides enough hints to find the full solution.

Finally, and most famously, the monolith puzzle. It has been brute-forced, but no one has truly solved it yet as far as I'm concerned. While some have found justification for it having no in-game solution, I see none. There is already an extremely tenuous thematic connection between the platforming and the tetromino codes needed to solve the monolith; with nothing in the game to explain how to even begin to find the right code, the thematic connection is completely broken for me.

In the end, that is my problem with Fez. The platforming gameplay and puzzle-solving gameplay are only thinly connected by the general 3D-to-2D theme. The platforming taught me how to solve the harder platforming puzzles through the gameplay, but none of the platforming puzzles are very difficult. The puzzle-solving taught me to look for clues everywhere, but the hard puzzles have no clues to find. They are hard for the sake of being hard, and solving them is more a matter of brute force--or the luck of being on the same loopy wavelength as the developers. Furthermore, they worked in direct opposition to the gameplay: by the time I reached that phase of the game, platforming through each room for the nth time had become an annoyance, yet it was still necessary to look for clues that were not there**.

The treasure map puzzles, in contrast, were not hard to solve, but made good use of both the rotation mechanic and the symbolic codes. The crypt maps in particular manage to both require that I decode the numbering system while also teaching me about that system. More puzzles like that, with some involving the alphabet, some involving the artifacts, and all having an increasing difficulty curve, would have gone a long way to making me feel better about the integration of puzzles, codes, and gameplay.

Fez is a beautiful game, and for the first 10-12 hours I couldn't get enough of it. But it wants to have it both ways: to have mystery and uncertainty, yet also have a solution to everything. It finally broke for me when I realized that the puzzles and gameplay are almost entirely disconnected, and that all the time I spent looking for clues for the hardest puzzles was wasted.

Footnotes:

* The game bizarrely calls 100% completion "209.6%".

** I never got the "jetpack" code to work. Was it removed for the Mac version?