Review: Fez

Fez is a Metroidvania platformer for the Xbox 360’s Xbox Live Arcade. It was developed by Phil Fish, with help from the developing company he may or may not still work for, Polytron.

Our hero, Gomez, exploring one of the many jaw-dropping worlds of Fez.

Gomez is a happy little white thing living in a two-dimensional world, who one day receives a magical fez from a giant cube that allows him to see the third dimension in everything. Overusing this power causes the giant cube to explode, sending its pieces everywhere. Now Gomez must explore this new three-dimensional world and find all the missing cube pieces.

                  

Fez starts off looking like a traditional 2D game, but with the power of the fez you can rotate the camera ninety degrees, revealing new areas for Gomez to explore, or messing with the perspective so you can reach inaccessible areas. If, for example, there is a platform that Gomez cannot reach, you can rotate the camera so that the platform appears closer. While the world is 3D, from our perspective it always looks two-dimensional, and Gomez always is two-dimensional, so from Gomez’s standpoint it looks like the platform is closer. Or, if Gomez has walked to the end a cliff on the side of the hill and there is no way you can go farther, you can turn the camera and show whatever steps are on the next side of the hill. Most of puzzles in the game are all about finding a way to manipulate the perspective so you can reach a higher level.

The camera, mid turn.

Gomez quest to find all the missing cubes pieces is non-linear. There is a hub that Gomez starts near with about four major paths branching off of it, but you are never told you have to go down one path, all you have to do is explore. There are many teleporters and hidden doors that let you fast travel to different areas you have already explored, adding to non-linearity.

There are no enemies around to kill Gomez. The only way Gomez can die is if he falls from too high a place, and a couple of poisonous water areas and a few of smashing rocks. If you do die Gomez just immediately respawns at where he jumped.

The best part about Fez is exploring Gomez’s world. I know there are other, more detailed 3D games out there, but there is something endlessly entertaining about reaching a new area and then seeing how it changes and what new stuff you find when you flip the camera. I also recognize that the heavily pixilated art style might be called simplistic, but Fish takes full advantage of his color pallet and malleability of such an art style to create colorful and exotic looking landscapes. There is also a lot of diversity and general bizarreness to the different places Gomez explores, which keeps the game interesting until the end.

Even cliche places like forests look great.

There are thirty-two cubes that need to be collected to complete the game. There are both regular cubes that are hidden, and pieces of cubes just floating around. Finding eight cube pieces makes a whole cube. Whole cubes are not difficult to find, usually they are behind a hidden door or floating in the corner of a room. The pieces are even easier,they float out in the open and give off yellow pulses so you know how to angle the camera to find them. This is good though, because it encourages looking around and relaxing instead of racking your brain.

Those little yellow blocks are the cube pieces.

There are also thirty-two anti-cubes to find to see the true ending, and finding those are where the game falls apart. Anti-cubes are collected after completing puzzles; some of the puzzles are reasonable, but most of them are unfair. The puzzles where the game tells you all you need to know in the room where the anti-cube is located are fine; all the puzzles should have been like those.

A lot of the anti-cubes require putting in a code that looks like a cheat code, for them to appear. The codes are represented by with a series of glyphs that can only be decoded in one place in the entire game. The ones where the code is out in the open and all you have to do is find it are passable, but the ones where the code is hidden, or split up into parts and hidden, are a pain.

Even worse than that are the puzzles that require translating Fish’s made up language and number system to solve, because there is no good cipher anywhere and solving them requires memorization and trial and error. Doing work like that is never fun.

The worst ones though, are the ones that need a QR scanner to figure out. It is so unfair to think that player would have a scanner handy.

Not that any of it really matters. If you get all the anti-cubes, instead of getting the normal ending, which I would describe as trippy pointless garbage, you get the true ending, which I would describe as different trippy pointless garbage.

The game is glitchy as Hell. At first I thought it was intentional, since the game is supposed to be inside a living video game, but I do not think all the slowdown, or the few times where it could  not load were intentional.

I would have liked some more story, or even backstory, like what the deal is with the cube or what is causing all those tears in reality to appear. There are hints of something to do with an ancient civilization, but that is largely conjecture on my part. There are a few signs to read, but they are in that awful made up language and I am not translating it.

Fez is a game that does so well for so long then just crashes and burns at the end, which is a real shame. I would recommend hust ignoting it problems so you enjoy the rest of the game.