If I were to take FEZ at face value, then my thoughts would be pretty brief: it’s a damn good puzzle-platformer game with a hella strong core, taking a 2D interconnected world and twisting it and turning it to achieve greater heights. It’s never particularly difficult or challenging, but it’s fun; reaching new areas is intriguing, and getting the cubes is ultra satisfying, and in a way, I’m kinda glad it never tries to have really hard sections or some sort of final challenge, because even tho I’m sure that’d be cool, and I would really love to see this dimension-shifting mechanic taken up a notch, I also think the way that it is makes the world feel much more organic than it otherwise would, and sells the idea that this is an experience more about the act of exploring than traversing perilous sections.

However, taking FEZ at face value is impossible, or at least it is for me. FEZ is the jumps and beautiful sounds and sights of its adorable ruined worlds as much as it is the secrets that lie within.

I have talked about my fascination with the ancient world and the mysticism and desire to learn that comes with simply witnessing it, whether it is the remnants of a bygone civilization or the remains of an animal that walked the earth hundreds of millions of nights ago. FEZ has a ton of the former and not much of the latter, but what it shares with both of those is that feeling.

The feeling of stumbling upon something you shouldn’t even be able to understand, of seeing the carvings in the wall and the very code that holds reality together and finding answers behind it—it’s satisfying to beat a platforming challenge and get to a chest with a key in it, but it’s equally, if not even more fulfilling, to fit pieces of the puzzle hidden yet in plain sight.

Spirals of purple marble endlessly repeating, secrets to be revealed by feathered friends or written outside of the game itself, tongues that can be completely translated, and moments like what happened to me where I solved a puzzle by complete chance by just fucking around moving some blocks; connecting the deepest secrets of the world through the addition of the Anti-Cubes alone was an amazing decision. Even after pulling apart layers on top of layers to get some of them, I still feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s in here, what can be found, like an excavation that just has begun.

Every step is a new discovery, and making it to each of the main hub worlds opens a new horizon, from the oldest depths to the stormiest peaks, and it’s all so… tranquil. The wonderful, beautiful pixel art mixed with the outstanding OST, it compels you to keep going, to see juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust a lil’ more, to keep going a bit further, only to be met with a teleporter, going back to the hub, and repeating that process over and over again. It says a lot when, in the year 2024, a game that uses QR codes or 4th wall breaks to solve puzzles doesn’t make me groan; on the contrary, in fact, it manages to fit into that secret uncovering process tremendously well.

There are pieces that don’t quite fit: the fact that quite a few of those more hidden puzzles end up being a combination of LT and LR inputs is a bit disappointing and misses the mark on what other Anit-Cube quests accomplish so well, and there’s some even weirder stuff like annoying void squares that appear randomly and aren’t anything more than a dumb annoyance or how entering doors may just crash to desktop randomly, which isn’t part of the experience, mind you, and it takes you completely out of it sometimes. It only happened once to me, but this being a problem present years later is a bit disappointing, to be honest.

It's a cube quest that a few times can be a little disappointing or frustrating, but that’s something I can easily look past when the rest of it is so stellar that the act of opening doors is the most exciting fucking thing ever. It invites to wonder and imagine, and there’s so much to be solved and found that, after hitting credits, I feel like the exploration can go even further…  Oh, and also, Gomez’s design and name is the best fucking thing ever and there’s no contest, the most basic-ass lil white dude and I love it, look at his smile!

Adventure is out there, and it carries mysteries with it, it’s about time someone solves them.

Note - as I did not beat this game, this write-up should be taken more as a set of observations than a genuine review.

Note - this game contains a couple scenes that may be triggering to epileptics


Fez was one of three titles popularized by Indie Game: The Movie, and arguably ended-up the most famous of the bunch. Why was that? Well, I’m so glad you asked as it had to do with its co-creator and media representative Phil Fish. Now, Fish’s rise-and-fall among the gaming community is its own rabbit hole worth looking into (though please stave away from the laughably apologetic This Is Phil Fish video that went viral years ago+); however, I bring him up because, even as his popularity fell, there remained a strong advocacy on behalf of his baby - that, no matter how much you hated the guy, his art merited consideration purely out of innate quality.

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news (not really), but the truth is Fez ain’t all that great. It features an absolutely fascinating concept, and is certainly far better than anything I could ever create; yet it can’t help escaping from the fact that it’s just boring. As a neo-platformer, the gimmick here revolves around the ability to turn your screen on its horizontal axis four different ways, theoretically yielding 4 different variations of each level: and yeah, that seamless perspective shifting is definitely amazing, but the issue is it’s rarely used towards anything beyond basic navigation quandaries. Oh, is that ledge out of reach? Well, flip clockwise and bam, now you’ve got grassy hooks to climb on. Are those twirling boards leading out to the middle of nowhere? Well, just change directions and you’ll see they actually ascend upwards!

That’s literally the extent of Fez’s imagination -- it takes your conventional side-scrolling formula, reels it vertically, and swaps obstacle solutions between dimensions and doors (more on that later). Sure, the ploy is fun at first, but once the novelty wears off you’re left with a very flat experience that drags and drags to the point of being unfun. The most diversity I ever saw involved matching external objects to some background effigy, and triggering explosives at specially-marked areas, but their solutions, again, entailed no creativity - just whirl-and-haul until things set in place. The problem isn’t even that it’s easy, but moreso that it’s repetitive -- imagine if twisting resulted in kinetic changes in the world? Or were tied to triggering power-ups? I know I’m spitballing here, however, that’s the kind of advice I wish had been imparted on Fish and company during development.

Unlike most platformers, the goal of Fez is to collect yellow cubes located amidst a myriad of interconnected stages, and while darting between areas is pretty cool, it ultimately harms the game by spacing things out too much - what should’ve been singular realms are broken-up into multiple skotas you can only access via specific doors, and as finding said doors fills the bulk of Fez’s gametime, the endeavor gets tepid very fast. I’m not lying when I say you’ll be spending 90% of your time locating hidden enclaves, with these enclaves, in turn, being nothing more than barren islands or, worse case scenario, empty rooms. There’s no discovering new mechanics or happening upon some hidden lore, just chamber upon isle of prolonged blandness.

The continual need for fresh cubes means you’ll be doing a lot of backtracking as well, and the lack of a quick travel option to individual lands consequently adds insult to injury - if you want to return to a previously-absconded area, be prepared to go piece-by-piece-by-piece as you waste time re-netting your way there (the devs not even bothering to mark each door++).

To Fez’s credit, it has a fine map system equipped with dynamic motion, but rather than waste time programming it, I feel the Polytron Corporation would’ve been better off sticking with closed-off levels that players would have had to complete in-full before moving on to the next place. As it stands, there’s just nothing special about Fez beyond the initial 5 minutes of bliss your average gamer will get from experiencing its new mechanics. Even the side content, involving the use of cryptic pictorial riddles to solve puzzles, is hampered by the sheer distance between said clues and their accompanying location.

Graphically, Fez got a lot of praise for its presentation, and I’ll definitely agree that it’s the best aspect of the game, combining pleasant colors and calming aesthetics into a pixelated masterpiece - the kind of title I could see someone running around in purely to replicate 5th century Buddhist meditation techniques. Most of the backdrops and environs take clear inspiration from Mayan-based architecture, combining stoney ruins with colored blocks, grassy covered exteriors, looming trees, and an abundance of overflowing water; however, there are a fair amount of locations where Fish and his team dip into transcendent territory, whether it’s the World 1-2 inspired sewers, a storm-ridden manor, or the blood-flooded eeriness of the hub plane.

That same effort was carried over to the interior chambers, which could be really bizarre depending on the abode. In my abridged playthrough, for example, I caught sight of map carvings, robot idols, bathroom pumps, dorm room bedding, and even a witch’s pot. Perhaps there was some thematic message Fish intended, but if there was I was too dumb to discern it.

One of the stranger decisions Polytron makes is the incorporation of wildlife, other NPCs, and a dynamic day/night cycle. I say strange because, outside of two puzzles(+++), they don’t serve any purpose in the game and accordingly feel like a waste of money. You could at least make an argument for the presence of humans out of explaining the protagonist’s existence, but given the sheer amount of unique animations programmed for each animal (worms, rats, birds, frogs, butterflies, etc…), I was expecting them to occupy a role in-game besides standard window dressing. Don’t get me wrong, the artisans absolutely deserve credit for their modeling and aptitude, it’s just a case of Chekhov's Gun being violated.

Fauna aren’t the only entities who got specially-coded movements - your anonymous hero may look like a 2D Sackboy, but he’s actually quite versatile in terms of his scripted actions: idle away too long from the keyboard and he’ll fall asleep; hop in water and he’ll paddle like a fish; stand near the edge of a ledge and he’ll teeter over ala DKC.

Unfortunately, the sound editing stumbles too much to be worth a listen, particularly with regards to the music cues. Your basic SFX is all well-and-good, if a bit soft-mixed; however, I found almost every jingle to be obnoxiously loud: opening treasure chests sprouts a Zelda-esque ripoff, jumping into portals triggers a booming vibration, and fully-assembling cubes yields you a disparaging synth-beat.

That obsession with synth carries over to the score, composed by a guy appropriately called Disasterpeace. Peace indulges in a subgenre of the matter known as chiptune, which, as the name suggests, renders every other melody in the OST like something between the NES and SNES generation. It’s a theoretically-solid concept (Kirby’s Adventure did something similar after all), but the problem is Peace’s compositions end-up sounding more akin to early-2000s electronica than synthetic instruments, resulting in a lot of extended flat notes filtered through an e-piano. It’s outdated, it’s misophonic, and most importantly contrasts with the placid visuals.

There’s really nothing else to say about Fez. While I’m always happy for indie games that break through the zeitgeist barrier, Fez ultimately doesn’t live-up to any of the notoriety surrounding it or its creator.


NOTES
+Since that video is (sadly) popular, I’ll flesh out my opinion of it in the event of potential fan backlash -- Danskin does raise good points about the nature of the Internet and the tendency for users to project general sentiments onto a singular persona for the sake of a homogenized rebuttal/attack; however, his brushing-off of Fish’s behavior under the argument of Internet celebrities not needing to be held to higher standards is preposterous to say the least. Yes, some of Fish’s quotes did get blown out of proportion by the media, but Fish himself did no favors as far as adapting to criticism or changing his public image. And no Mr. Danskin, it doesn’t matter if he was always this way - when you’re put into a position of power and influence, you’re obligated to be professional lest you contribute to the normalization of toxic behavior par for the course for such authority figures.

++Standing in front of a previously-entered door will bring-up a projection of the next place, but given that you have to match this with the corresponding map image, it’s fundamentally a two-pronged process that would’ve been better off with conventional naming.

+++The first is nighttime revealing a hidden door; the second is a giant owl statue puzzle, though from what I understand both are completely optional anyway.

-There’s a mining section with a bunch of Mjolnir-looking hammers.

-There’s a track here that I swear was all but recreated in Evan’s Remains.

Fez has got to be one of the most clever games I have played. It is hard to pin down exactly what sort of game this wants to be. It has platforming, yes; but it shows no signs of of wanting to challenge the player with checkpoints, lives or long levels. "Death" in this game serves more to convenience the player than to punish them. "Oh you missed a jump? Go on, try again, you'll get it this time!" it seems to say as it places you right back where you fell from. It has puzzles, but the only mechanical consistency between them is that there are no two which can be solved the same way. "So you decoded the Tetris Block code? Good job! We're not going to be using that from now on though..."

This might come off like I am sarcastically mocking the game, but these are actually the reasons why Fez is so phenomenal. The game has no interest in something as primitive as mechanics, story or level design. It wants to give you a perspective, make you consider problems, information and images in different ways and it achieves this everywhere it tries. No puzzles can be solved in the same way because you must adopt a new line of thinking for each one. The game does not give you a narrative motivation because if you booted it up, you should want to play for the sake of playing. The platforming is forgiving because the game does not care about how well you can press buttons, but how well you can shift your perspective to traverse an area.

Of course, that does not meant the game is always easy to play. There are some problems, such as the awkwardness of moving around the world, the warp gates not really feeling like they help you all that much, the minor visual and mechanical clunkiness you experience and how, although a compelling choice which speaks to the mentality of the creator, the puzzles can be so obscure and abstract that they can become frustrating. However, ultimately, I think I can overlook these grievances given how impressively the game achieves its main objective.

The visuals are fantastic. The 2D pixel graphics are cute and inviting, but seeing the level move from 2D to 3D and back again never gets old. The fact that this mechanic has not been more widely utilised, as the pixel-art style has, speaks to the idea that what Fez has achieved here is not so easily replicated. It is not only visually pleasing, but a technical marvel.

The game concludes with no less of a spectacle. I have not 100% completed this game, but the ending I received was no disappointment. The graphics, colours and vectors it presents boils the interactive medium down to its basic building blocks in order to remind you what actually makes it up. I really think it is a pretty stunning thing to behold, and works so well because of how successfully the game has communicated its "raison d'être" up to this point.

The fact that Fez has no secret achievements is a great way to highlight the game's philosophy. This is exactly the type of game that you would expect that from, but this game has no intentions of hiding anything from you. Its puzzles are not about obfuscation, they are about enlightenment. Every facet of the design of this game is meant to have you think outside the box (some call it a cube). Scanning a QR code was not as prevalent a means to receive information as it is now, over a decade later, but finding some items rely simply on scanning one, it is up to you to know how to do that.

Even if times have changed, Fez holds up, and I would now consider this game a must play. Not only is it a delight in its presentation, but it is a masterpiece in its conception and art in its execution. I strongly recommend this to anyone who wants to see something different.