On the surface, FEZ is a pretty simple platformer with a similar goal to many others. You explore areas, collect items, and eventually get to an end goal. There are 32 golden Cubes to collect. Some are formed from collecting 8 smaller bits, some are placed at the end of platforming segments, and some are hidden in chests. The structure of the game is pretty open, with the world branching out into many different areas pretty early on, with some areas opening up based on the number of Cubes collected. After collecting 32 Cubes, the door to the ending of the game can be opened. I'm not going to be going into depth on FEZ's "main" game because I honestly don't have a whole lot to say about it. The platforming is never difficult, which is probably a good thing because the movement mechanics at play don't feel good enough to sustain challenging levels. Even putting difficulty aside, the 3D rotation gimmick doesn't feel nearly fleshed out enough in the level design. There are some interesting shreds of ideas here and there, but it never reaches any truly great heights, which is a disappointment to me considering the idea has a ton of potential for platforming scenarios. Exploration and backtracking is also often frustrating due to some disjointed world design and a confusing map system.

To be clear, I wouldn't say this portion of the game is particularly bad, and if nothing else it's worth a playthrough for the overall atmosphere of the world. There are several areas to explore throughout, each with an interesting setting that gives a sense of history, and the world is always presenting some unique new visuals to take in. But the real star of the show here is the music, which is nothing short of outstanding. Disasterpeace's ambient tracks that accompany the world of FEZ strike a huge array of emotions ranging from relaxing, mysterious, uplifting, to downright haunting at times. Music has subtle changes based on what time of day it is, or whether you're in the foreground or background of a scene, and dynamic layering gets added in as you progress through certain levels, among many other techniques. The songs in this game continue to stick with me for hours after I've stopped playing, echoing in my head as I go to sleep at night. During my initial journey through the various levels, just soaking in the atmosphere of the locations complemented by the wonderful soundtrack was one of the things I enjoyed the most.

If this were all there is to FEZ, then I'd be content to stop writing here, wrapping this up by calling it a mostly passable, easygoing platformer with an interesting if under-utilized twist, that's ultimately carried by some exceptional atmosphere. Those familiar with the game know that that is far from all there is to this game, so with all of that out of the way, let's get into the stuff I actually want to talk about.

At some point during your adventure you're almost sure to find an Anti-Cube, at which point you're introduced to their existence. There are 32 Anti-Cubes to match the 32 golden Cubes, for a combined total of 64 Cubes to collect. The Anti-Cubes are found through solving puzzles which often require much more abstract thinking, observing details and making connections between often distant things. You might have guessed by now that this was my favorite part of the game, but it's also not exactly correct to say that my favorite part of the game was merely the task of finding and obtaining collectibles; I'll come back to this in a bit. With a count of 32, these are hidden in a pretty wide variety of ways with some of them going farther than many, if any, other games I've ever seen go in what they ask of the player to decipher.

Of course, with a wide range of puzzles it also should be expected that they vary in quality; while some are exceptionally good, some of them are underwhelming in certain ways. In order to articulate where I'm coming from here, I need to point something out about the game: the vast majority of FEZ's puzzle solutions end with entering a code on the controller. This is not a point against the puzzles in the game, and on its own the statement doesn't go anywhere near doing the game justice, but it's important to point out in order to understand where certain puzzles are strong and where others are lacking. In most cases, codes are the game's mechanism for checking that you solved a puzzle, and this mechanism has some major advantages to it, mainly the fact that the only thing standing between you and the treasure is your own mental understanding of the information. If you know the answer, you can get it; you don't have to hit a bunch of in game switches that cause the game to make it appear. This makes it feel less artificial, like the treasure has always been there hidden away, waiting for someone to figure out the answer in whatever way they happen to. Anyway, the point here is that the code is not the puzzle. The code is merely a check for the answer; the puzzle is all of the mental work that needs to be done in order to arrive at that code. The task of entering in the code on its own isn't a particularly interesting thing to do. The interesting part is the process of making observations, culling out the correct information, and making the right connections, which can be a pretty elaborate but very satisfying task in FEZ. So, when I say that the bell puzzle is one of the best puzzles in the game, it's not because hitting each side of the bell a certain number of times is some mind blowing thing to do; it's because in order to even arrive at that idea, you first need to recognize that the symbols on the sides of the bell are numbers which is hinted at elsewhere in the game, and then decipher the numbering system using hints from various places. The ringing of the bell is just a fancy way of dressing up the answer.

All of this is to say, when a puzzle ends with a code, the amount of satisfaction from the puzzle is going to depend on what actually led to obtaining that code. One of the more annoying setups was the obelisks. Before I go further on this I should mention that figuring out how to read the tetromino symbols and translate the tablets to the correct sequence of inputs was one of the highlights of the game for me. It's particularly great in that understanding this language has more uses after learning it; being able to access new areas because you've gained some knowledge about the world is very satisfying. However, seeing these obelisks in various places, wondering about what they mean, and probably racking your brain over it for quite some time before finally stumbling into noticing that going into first person mode allows you to just see a code written on the ground, isn't exactly compelling. To make matters worse, the hypercube companion character comes out and points them out when you first come across them, drawing your attention to it when you don't even gain the ability needed to solve them until after you've seen the normal ending of the game. There are four of these, and once you know that clicking the left analogue stick is the entire puzzle, the other 3 are just a matter of going to them and checking them off. This isn't the worst offense however; that honor goes to the tuning forks. The first time I found one of these, the hypercube asked me if I feel something. The puzzle here is feeling a vibration pattern on the controller and interpreting the vibration of each side of the controller to pressing the trigger on the corresponding side, and just copying the sequence. Even without a hint this is a pretty simple connection to make and I imagine most people's first idea that comes to mind would be correct. I have no idea why they felt the need to include a hint that essentially gives away the entire puzzle in the same game that trusts the player to decipher three different systems of encoded symbols on their own, especially considering these are Anti-Cubes, which are supposed to be challenging puzzles. It's downright insulting and comes in stark contrast to the rest of the game. As with the obelisks there are also four of these, meaning these two categories of "puzzle" make up a quarter of the Anti-Cubes in the game, which is a bit of a disappointment for me.

Fortunately, that covers the worst of it. I'm not going to go into all of them, but I do want to highlight some that stood out to me. I quite liked the endlessly scrolling vertical room, where you have to notice that the terrain you're climbing on makes the shape of a tetromino code, which reveals an Anti-Cube when executed. The clock was an interesting idea, though I think it might have been better to hide a single cube here when all four hands align in a particular way, rather than a cube for each hand where the connection is much easier to make. Still, it's a good use of the 3D space and the way it's influenced by the real world time according to your system clock is a great idea. The observatory is another standout, mainly because the first time you get here, you likely will have no idea what anything means when you look through the telescope from any angle. As you continue to explore after understanding the tetromino patterns, you'll probably notice the constellations at some point, and revisiting the observatory after understanding what these mean provides the answer. The isolated puzzle rooms were also all enjoyable particularly when they required me to really think about the positions of objects in 3D space as opposed to just some position from some side. As an aside, the music in these rooms is one of my favorite tracks in the game; it gives me chills every time I hear it.

Treasure maps are another great inclusion, and their implementation is about as close to perfect as it gets. Many games have similar systems to this but they usually fall short in some way. In particular, they reminded me of the Hint Art from Super Mario Odyssey, which was one of my favorite things in that game. Mario Odyssey's system was implemented mostly very well but makes a few key missteps, which FEZ gets right by contrast. Most crucially, in FEZ, you can get the treasure the map hints at whether or not you've obtained or even seen the map. All the map does is give you information about something that already exists in the world. In Mario Odyssey, I was disappointed to find upon starting a second playthrough of the game that Hint Art moons don't actually appear in their locations until you've examined the image that corresponds to it. This makes the whole thing feel artificial, like you're not using a clue to uncover some secret treasure that has been there the whole time, but rather just activating some switch that made the game put it there. Beyond that, it makes subsequent playthroughs much more annoying since it's a lot easier to remember the actual moon locations than whether or not you've looked at the correct image in another level. In FEZ, it's always there; if you know how to get it, you can get it. This maintains the immersion while making subsequent playthroughs more interesting since you now have the ability to utilize information you've already learned. On an additional note, the game doesn't indicate that a treasure map was used in any way once you've gotten the treasure, and this is a good thing. The game never tells you how to read them in the first place, so it makes sense that it wouldn't suddenly confirm that a map was what led to the treasure. Instead, the game trusts you to be able to keep track of it yourself which maintains the feeling that you're just using information you happened to come across in order to find something, as opposed to just checking things off of a list. I also appreciated that certain observations need to be made about the 3D space these refer to in order to fully understand and use them; it's not just about recognizing a location. One of the coolest usages of treasure maps was the door sequence in the graveyard area, which requires you to find four separate treasure maps in different locations, as well as to understand the number symbols in order to determine the order of doors to take.

QR codes are an interesting inclusion to me. Playing this game in 2020, seeing a QR code and scanning it to get a button code which reveals an Anti-Cube seems laughable. QR codes are so common nowadays that the first thing you're going to do when you see one in a game is scan it, so there isn't really much of a puzzle there looking at it now, but I think that might not have been the case in 2012. Smartphones were at least pretty widespread already, but QR scanning wasn't natively built into camera apps for quite some time -- the iPhone had it integrated into its camera app in 2017. It would have been much less obvious at the time of FEZ's release that these codes were something that you were supposed to scan with a phone, and the patterns may have even blended in a bit with the square pattern motif that exists everywhere you go in the game if you didn't already know what a QR code was. But what's more interesting to me about these is the way they're actually used in the collectible system itself. The Anti-Cubes obtained from these are actually the same ones obtained from other puzzles that can be solved from clues baked into the environment in certain areas. This makes it seem more like these are there as alternate solutions to other puzzles in the game, but that idea works a lot better in a world where it isn't really obvious what you're supposed to do with a QR code. Now it just feels like a shortcut to skip a puzzle. Playing the game now, I wish I had known they do this in advance, so that I would just opt to find the "real" solutions instead. This may be the only major way this game shows its age now, outside of a couple dated meme references.

There's one more Anti-Cube puzzle I want to mention, and I've been saving this one for now because it demonstrates a microcosm of some greater things that I think the game achieves very well. The puzzle in question is inside the boiler room in the starting village. A simple description of this puzzle would be as follows: scattered along the walls are some paper notes that each have a tetromino symbol and a number symbol on them. You need to understand the number system so that you can order the notes from 1 to 8 and execute the corresponding inputs in that order. If you've played the game you might say this is a fine description, but in actuality it falls into a trap that's easy to fall into when describing puzzles you've already solved. It doesn't convey the full experience of the puzzle because it leaves out a crucial component: noise. In addition to the notes relevant to the code, there are numerous other notes scattered around this room, with patterns and symbols you might or might not recognize depending on how much of the game you've played. The first time you come into this room, you will have no idea what any of it means, what is relevant and what isn't, and so forth. It's only after you've spent a lot of time elsewhere that you can start to make any sense of it. Knowing what to do based on what you see is an obvious part of a puzzle, but for this particular kind of puzzle that involves figuring out the relationships between objects in your surroundings, an equally important part is figuring out what you're even supposed to be looking at. I've described several other puzzles in the game above, but I've done so with a similar style of only summarizing the relevant information. The truth is, all of these are presented with some amount of noise, and this is an area where the game really excels. These puzzles would be less compelling if you immediately knew exactly what you're supposed to be looking for. Likewise, the amount of satisfaction from figuring out the correct solution increases when you know you've made the correct connections among many other irrelevant details. There has to be room to get things wrong in order for getting it right to feel significant. If you were to remove everything but the notes with tetrominos and numbers from the boiler room, the fact that some relationship between those specific things needs to be decoded would be far too obvious even from the first time you enter the room. That's not to say obscuring things in unreasonable amounts of nonsense is the best way to design a puzzle, but the game walks the line pretty well. Upon first playing through the game, you'll be overloaded with patterns and symbols everywhere you go, and it's impossible to know what is really meaningful for a while. It takes a lot of time exploring the world and taking everything in before you can process it all. This gives a feeling of slowly making sense of an unknown world around you little by little, which highlights the other aspect of the game that the boiler room puzzle plays into well: world building. The notes on the wall are references to things that can be seen throughout the world, with markings indicating someone's effort to understand them. One item in the room is a drawing of a strange square formation of tetrominos that can be seen in another room in a distant area. Another is a symbol you find in the graveyard. There's also a drawing of a strange skull, and some letter symbols. All of this gives an impression of this room being someone's secret conspiracy theory dungeon where they've obsessively been trying to solve the mysteries of the world. Someone else has been trying to figure this all out before you, and they've left traces here.

As you explore the various areas in the world, a story starts to unfold through the environments. Clues embedded into every section of the world paint a picture of a species of 2D creatures that discovered the third dimension, eventually evolved into a more intelligent people, progressed as a civilization and then mysteriously disappeared. It's not a particularly mind blowing story, but what really drew me in was the way it all unfolds in game. Earlier I talked about the atmosphere of the game being great for its visuals and music, but the glue that holds it all together is the sense of mystery to it all; everything comes together to give this feeling of uncovering the mysteries of a lost civilization through exploring their ruins. A game with a focus on puzzles is a natural fit for creating this kind of atmosphere for a couple of reasons. The most obvious being that puzzles that have to be solved through learning about the world means you will naturally learn about the world from the gameplay; the storytelling and world building are never at odds with the game itself. The more subtle advantage is that having to look for clues to puzzles everywhere means you will naturally be looking at everything in the environment and paying attention to it, since you never know when something will be useful. This allows bits of storytelling to be scattered in different places for you to pick up on, even if they are never directly useful for finding collectibles. When I said my favorite part of the game wasn't exactly the process of finding collectibles, this is what I meant. The best way to describe it would be to say that my favorite part of the game was everything beneath the surface -- the whole process of learning about the world of the game, which was always rewarding in more ways than just the video gamey collecting side.

Clues relating to the story of the Zu people are communicated in many ways including carvings, pictures and ruins, but perhaps most interestingly, through language. Earlier I alluded to the game having three sets of encoded symbols to decipher. In addition to the tetromino symbols that communicate button inputs, there is a numbering system and a written language. Some of the best moments in my experience with the game were in figuring out how to understand these systems. They're never required to get to the normal ending, and it's pretty unlikely you'd figure out the letters and numbers before getting to the end of the game once. But what's really noteworthy is just how organically the clues to solving these are presented. In addition to the 64 cubes, there are four artifacts that can be found in the game. Two of these are cubes that would be the physical objects used to actually write the numeric and alphabetical symbols. These don't tell you how to read them, but are the only explicit clue that one set of characters is numbers and another is letters. But it's possible that you could have made that connection before discovering the artifacts. For example, I discerned what numbers were from the hint about reading the tetromino tablets, which looked like a list of steps or instructions to me, so I assumed the accompanying symbols were the numbers 1, 2 and 3, which I was able to confirm later.

Between the alphabet and number systems, the numbers had a stronger implementation particularly because it isn't exactly just a mapping of characters we know to some other characters, but rather a unique system for writing numbers that seems like some group of people might believably come up with and use. As a result, the clues to deciphering them are presented through relationships between the numbers themselves, and part of decoding them is noticing what relationship is being conveyed. Perhaps most impressively, all of the clues that exist in the classroom are in the form of relationships between numbers that would actually be taught in something like a math class, so it feels less like the game is trying to teach you than you just learning through observation. Even when looking at all the right information, it still takes a significant amount of thought to solve, and I wasn't able to make all the correct connections myself until I actually stopped thinking about the symbols as numbers, and just paid attention to the relationship between the symbols themselves. The alphabet is closer to a mapping of our own alphabet to another set of characters, but I can't think of a way it could have been communicated as naturally if it had been a more distant set of characters and words. Most crucially, there is nothing in the game that tells you any direct connection between English letters and the Zu symbols. This means that in order to solve the alphabet, you need to find something that you already know for certain what it says, and there isn't anything really obvious about this anywhere in the game. The key to the alphabet is also presented pretty naturally in the form of something that seems like it makes sense to exist in the world, and like with the numbers, even when you're in the right place, you could stare at it for hours without understanding it. Once you see the hint however, it seems impossible to miss.

Anyway, deciphering the alphabet is never required for any of the Anti-Cube puzzles, and I think this is a good thing. The process of figuring out the language is inherently satisfying enough on its own, and being able to now read things around the world makes the game continue to be rewarding even after you've collected everything. The language gives the world building an extra layer beneath the observations you can already make from the environments, as you can now read signs and other writings spread throughout the different locations. My favorite instance is the cute looking neon sign in Nu Zu, which when translated, gives the impression that the black holes which were presumably caused by the star gate had escalated to the point of being a normal problem these people had to deal with in their everyday lives. There were a couple places this came up short however. After deciphering the language I was excited to go back to the past version of the town and see what all the character dialogue says. While some of it was clever, I was disappointed to find that there was a lot of repeated dialogue with many characters who seem completely different saying the exact same few things. This takes away from the otherwise fantastic sense of personality the game has, but worse still, comes off like they figured it shouldn't matter because most people will never bother trying to read it anyway. This is completely counter to the fact that a huge part of the appeal of the game is solving its mysteries, and furthermore, those who go far enough to understand it should arguably be given more attention, not less. I suppose the best piece of dialogue in the town is from the guy at the bottom, who asks you "how did you get in here," but this also makes me wonder why he is in there, or why he isn't afraid that he's stuck. Anyway, my last complaint is with the Hexahedron from the beginning of the game. I was hoping there would be some meaningful dialogue that might give more insight on what is going on, but when translated, the dialogue here mostly seems to be played for laughs. To be fair it's not especially important to me that any more plot details are explicitly given so this is only a minor complaint, but I do wish there was something just a little bit more substantial here.

To anyone who isn't already familiar with this game, it might easily seem at this point like I've covered everything. In fact, FEZ has one more set of collectibles in addition to the 64 cubes and 4 artifacts. These are extra hidden; the game never even indicates their existence until you find one, and to go along with that, I've avoided making any mention of them until now. The three red cubes, or "heart pieces" are supposed to be the game's most difficult to find secrets. These require much more work to solve than anything else in the game, and the idea was most likely that these weren't intended to be solved by any one person right away, but rather, they were there to give the most dedicated players something to keep cracking away at for however long it might take until people found the answers.

To that end one of them unfortunately completely fails, that being the one in the observatory. Earlier when talking about the tuning forks, I mentioned that translating the left side of the controller vibrating to a left trigger press and likewise for the right side was an easy connection to make, and that it would be many people's first instinct to try. If you agree with this, then you might also feel the same way about two lights flashing next to each other: left trigger for the light on the left, and right trigger for the light on the right. You might even start to note down the pattern of the blinking red lights that can be seen through the telescope, and then try inputting these in the same way. If you did this, you would probably find the red cube seemingly at random, which was what happened for me. If this seems like too simple of a solution given the description of what the red cubes are, that's because it isn't the intended solution to the puzzle. The way it's supposed to be solved is by translating the flashes to binary, and then each byte to a character, which gives the code. The problem here is that the code at the end is only six buttons long, only uses the triggers, and the full binary sequence just happens to contain the same pattern as the code itself. I even looked this up to make sure I didn't just mess up in noting it down and get lucky somehow, and confirmed that not only is the code contained in the binary multiple times, but other people did have the same thing happen as I did. This is such a huge oversight and kills one of what are supposed to be the game's deepest secrets. If you ask me, the core of the problem here is two things: the fact that only the triggers are used, and the code is too short. It's obvious to me that the reason only the triggers are used is because the code still uses the same notation of "LT" and "RT" that's used everywhere else in the game, but I think this is a misguided decision considering the intent is for these to be encoded in more difficult ways to begin with. They could have easily used single letters to represent up, down, left and right, as well as the A button. Triggers could have been differentiated using uppercase instead of lowercase. This would also have the benefit of allowing the code to be double the length that it is as is, because in its existing notation every other character is "T," which is ultimately useless. This really just seems like it wasn't well thought out, which is a disappointment.

The second red cube is in the form of a riddle written on a tablet, and as such, is the only puzzle in the game that requires understanding the alphabet. I don't have much to say about this one other than that it seems like the most "fair" puzzle of the three. Probably the biggest wrench that's thrown into this one is that it isn't clear how exactly you're supposed to enter the answer in terms of the positioning of the blocks. So on top of the fact that the riddle doesn't have an obvious answer, it's also not easy to even tell if you have the right answer or not, because you don't really know if you're even entering it correctly. This might seem frustrating, but I don't really have a problem with it in the context of a puzzle that is supposed to be a group effort to solve.

But the red cube I really want to talk about is the one in the monolith room. The clue to the solution for this one is on one of the treasure maps, but the gimmick to it is that only half of it is intact, while the rest of the map is burnt away. It's unknown whether anything else in the game actually gives the solution to this. The solution was initially found by brute force, and for all we know that could have been the intended way to get the answer. This seems to be one of the more divisive things in the game; as for me, it might actually be my favorite secret in the whole game. If you think including a non-puzzle with only an answer and no actual path to that answer is stupid, I wouldn't blame you, but consider the following: the only reason you feel that way is because of a preconceived expectation about how a video game should work. In this review I've talked a bit about FEZ's sense of mystery and how that is one of its strongest aspects. Puzzles are used well to achieve this as mentioned, but a problem with puzzles in conventional game design is that even if they blend into the world well, you still always know they're put there by a game designer with the intention for a player to solve them. This paradoxically runs counter to the idea of mystery, since nothing is really a mystery if you already know someone put it there with some intention to guide you to an answer. In reality, if you were uncovering mysteries and secrets from a lost civilization, this expectation wouldn't exist. Everything you find would just be something to think about and draw your own conclusions from. If you found something like a map or a book that would reveal a deep secret but half of it was missing, your reaction wouldn't be "how am I supposed to solve this?" but rather, more of a sense of wonder about what happened to it. Given FEZ's setting involving this kind of discovery through exploring ruins of a people that suffered some sort of cataclysm, it stands to reason that some of the clues to their history would be lost over time. In this way, having this manifest in game as one of the clues to one of the game's secret collectibles enhances the world building. There are two key points that make this work for me: firstly, the fact that an answer does exist. This is the logical next step from my point about treasure charts not requiring you to have collected them. Whether or not some clue is out there, the secret exists, and you can find it. But the bigger point is that even though some things are lacking as described already, there's already a satisfying amount of content in the game to get your money's worth. It doesn't come off as a terribly executed excuse for content, but rather, something extra thrown in for the most curious players to chase after. And considering there is still speculation about this stuff years after the game's release, I'd say this was a success. In preparation for writing this, I fell down a rabbit hole of theories relating to FEZ's unsolved puzzles, which also include two additional codes that were only found by decompiling the game. There's a wealth of speculation about many things throughout the game, ranging from plausible to desperately reaching for things to line up with the known solutions. Is there some hint to this out there somewhere? Does the text in the tome contain a clue to any of this? What about the skull artifact, or the hexahedron face picture that can be found in the boiler room? Even after all of what would traditionally be considered "content" has been found, it still feels like there is more to discover about this world. Maybe there are explanations to some of this stuff, or maybe there aren't, but that uncertainty is an essential part of the mysterious nature of the game. If everything in the game had some clear solution to it, the game would be missing part of what makes it unique, and the world just wouldn't have the same feeling as a result. Given our expectations about games, it's tempting to want everything that's presented as a puzzle to have a clear path to the answer. But sometimes, it's better for a mystery to just truly be a mystery.

As a whole package, FEZ is an interesting game to me. I've structured this review in a way that kind of mirrors my experience of playing the game, starting with the very surface level stuff, and slowly presenting the deeper layers as they unravel. If you started reading this knowing a lot about the game, you might find it strange that I opened with an emphasis on the platforming and level design and didn't make any mention of the more interesting stuff until a few paragraphs in. On the other hand, someone who knows nothing about the game might be put off by how much this review glosses over the mechanics and level design, giving them barely a paragraph before going in a completely different direction. This is largely how I see the game. It advertises itself as a platformer and shows off an interesting gimmick that's easy to understand visually, but its most interesting qualities come from completely different aspects of the game. It feels to me like you either come for one thing and get something else, or just specifically come for that other thing. Someone who knows nothing about the game that was drawn in by how it presents itself will either be disappointed or surprised, whereas someone drawn in specifically because of things they heard about the game's puzzles and mysteries probably wouldn't care at all about the platforming stuff. Regardless, it has some very high highs that more than make up for its shortcomings and I ended up falling in love with its puzzle solving, world building and sense of mystery. Buried beneath a bland, easy platformer is an incredibly unique game that requires much more creative thinking to complete than most other games, and pushes heavily against conventions with its deepest secrets. It's a game I'll surely come back and think about again from time to time.