Fez

Fez is an indie puzzle platformer five years in the making. As the brainchild of independent developer Phil Fish and his company Polytron, the game has undergone various trials and tribulations during its development, but after being fully remade three separate times and receiving a whole host of buzz from the games journalism community, Fez is finally here. In the game you play as Gomez, the adorable inhabitant of a playful 2D world. One day Gomez is bestowed a red fez by an old man, and after a series of strange events and a faux-reboot of the game, Gomez discovers his snazzy new hat has the power to rotate his 2D world in three dimensions. In Fez your goal is to use your newfound power of world rotation to explore your environment, solve puzzles, and collect cubes from around the world to complete the game.

The core mechanic of Fez is a refreshing and fun one to experience; the world can be swivelled round to connect previously disconnected platforms, to shed light on areas that otherwise couldn’t be seen, and to generally open up new ways to get from A to B. That being said, the game never goes particularly deep with its perspective puzzles or adds many new elements to mix things up, and the platforming in itself is never usually much of a challenge either; the game doesn’t even really contain any enemies. The true depth in Fez comes from a much more surprising place.

Within the game there are 64 cubes to collect; 32 normal cubes and 32 anti-cubes. Only 32 cubes are required to proceed to the game’s final area, but to experience everything the game has to offer, the player must collect all 64. While the normal cubes generally don’t require a great deal of effort to collect, the anti-cubes can only be obtained by completing some of the game’s more devilishly difficult puzzles. When it comes to the anti-cubes the game rarely spells anything out or gives any hints, it’s entirely up to you to connect the dots if you want to decode the full mysteries of Fez and overcome its real challenges.

In this sense the game is almost wonderfully deceptive, on the surface Fez would appear to be an innocently light platforming game, but for those who dare to dig beyond its simplistic wrapper, they find an intelligent and baffling puzzle game. However, while these puzzles do often appear ingeniously clever and make you feel like a master of your domain when you solve them, they also end up meaning that Fez is a game that asks a lot of you.

If you yield a sharp mind, well-suited to puzzle solving, Fez can be uniquely empowering, but if you don’t, it’s at best going to seem like an intelligent game that has to be tackled with a strategy guide, and at worst nothing more than a few hours of unremarkable platforming. In fact, until you can really break down Fez and work out its more cryptic mysteries, the game has a period of coming across as slightly mundane. Perhaps the greatest problem with Fez though, is the amount of backtracking it takes to get all the cubes. A large amount of the time in the game is locked up in lugging yourself around the expansive map, to make your way through the same screens you’ve seen plenty of times before. This is due in a considerable part to the need to go back and bag the anti-cubes if you want to get beyond 50% completion.

Easy or challenging though, a lot of care has obviously been put into the visuals and sound of Fez, with the game presenting an enchanting pixel art world full of detail and vivid colour. It’s been said that retro NES-style graphics have been overdone, but it’s hard not to be drawn in by Fez’s rich environments and cute sprites. Much of the game depicts old stone structures and villages covered in verdant foliage, but it also takes you through picturesque forests, morbid graveyards, and other areas. It’s all set against an ambient 8-bit soundtrack which does well in creating an often laid-back sense of atmosphere, complimentary to the visuals. The only real flaw in the game’s presentation is that when the camera pans from screen to screen, there is noticeable stuttering to the point where it can take you out of the moment.

If you’re someone who enjoys furrowing their brow over a fiendishly hard puzzle, and is ready to commit some real thinking time, you’re going to find a lot to love in Fez. For those who are not completionists, and just want some non-taxing platforming and a pleasant world to explore, Fez is probably going to be a great experience for you too. But if neither of these extremes sound like you’re cup of tea, you’re going to really have to like retro game art to come away satisfied.