Fez review

by Dr_Worm on Jul 28th, 2012

With over five years of development under its belt, Fez is an Xbox Live Arcade indie game that was clearly designed with strong ambitions and good intentions. It’s been so long in development, that other games like Super Paper Mario have come along with gameplay elements similar to Fez’s most unique mechanic – rotating the world to your advantage. Unfortunately, a number of issues, ranging from gameplay to bugginess, hold Fez back from being the magnum opus its creator Phil Fish aspired it to be.

Fez takes place in an initially 2D world represented in the indie-standard pixel art style. You play as Gomez, a little white blobby guy who looks sort of like a ghost. He lives in a town with other white blobby people, which, unlike most civilizations is built vertically. Through seemingly minor circumstances, Gomez encounters a hexahedron, a giant 3-dimensional artifact, a stark contrast from his typically flat world. The hexahedron isn’t in very good shape – its deterioration is causing Gomez’s world to deteriorate along with it. Gomez is gifted with a fez hat that gives him the power to shift the world around in 90 degree increments to assist him in finding cubes that help repair the hexahedron.

After a while of rotating the world around, Fez shines in its ability to mentally portray a 3D world in your head without showing it for long, just during the rotation itself. When you’re moving around and exploring, the world is in complete 2D, with almost nothing being evidently three-dimensional. The major problem with it is that much of the game’s exploration is based around rotating when you’ve run out of places to go. That “ah-ha” moment of rotating the world and seeing a new path you can now take dies down quickly, eventually disappears entirely, and gets replaced by the ever satisfying “oh duh” moment. You can use the power of rotation to affect parts of the world for the purpose of puzzle solving or exploration, but the novelty wears off just as fast.

Fez’s rotation mechanic is complimentary to its heavy emphasis on exploration. Virtually half of the cubes you get are found simply by exploring the game’s world. You can also collect 9 cube bits, which are scattered around to encourage you to explore every nook and cranny of each level, to form a full cube to add to your collection. Gomez’s world is explored by going from point A to point B. When you’ve reached point B, it’s usually a dead end, at which point you teleport back to point A to go on to point C. These warps are one-way, so they don’t help much when it comes to backtracking. However you’re bound to miss something and be forced to backtrack in order to continue progressing through the game. You get a handy dandy map, which does a good job of telling you what things you missed in each section, however you can’t tell which door goes where until you approach it (unless you take notes or just have really good memory).

The real appeal of Fez shouldn’t be rotating the game world, but rather solving its moderately cryptic puzzles. Secret codes that you activate by pressing buttons on the controller, deciphering a secret language with a sort of Rosetta stone, and piecing together clues involving owls are a few of the good ones. Fez’s more cryptic puzzles are what save it from being a completely forgettable game. They’re cleverly designed, and feel satisfying when you manage to solve them. I wish I could say what my favorite puzzle was, but even the slightest hint would spoil it. There’s lots of information to memorize, so having a notepad is pretty handy for this one.

There is, however, one exception that doesn’t seem like a big deal at first; the utilization of QR codes wound up presenting a few problems. For one thing, it’s just lazy design. Secondly you’ll only know how to use them if you know what a QR code actually is. Most importantly, I could never get the QR decoder site I used to convert the code due to poor in-game lighting and NPCs being in the way. I needed to go into MS Paint and build the image by scratch to decode it. I don’t have a device that can read QR codes (I used a camera), so I can’t say for sure whether or not others will share my problems. It might seem like I’m nagging about something minor, but there are at least three QR codes in the game, and unless you like using a guide, decoding them is necessary for 100% completion.

Fez’s challenge lies solely in solving puzzles. There are no enemies, nor bosses. Giving the player enemies to fight now and then would have brought some much needed pacing to exploration. And when you fall from too great a height or into a bottomless pit, you simply respawn where you jumped. It’s probably a design choice to compensate for its branch-linear exploration; it keeps the flow going, but it still doesn’t help with the backtracking issues.

For as unique a game Fez strives to be, it has an ambient and varied, yet generic soundtrack. The graphics don’t do much to help its genericism either, as aside from Gomez himself, Fez would look like any other pixel-art indie game. It’s also a bit buggy – there were a few moments where I fell through walls and perpetually kept dying, with the easy solution being to restart the game, however I did manage to get back in the game. I also experienced lag and increased loading times between levels when playing for a long period of time.

It’s not a particularly long game, I played it in two sittings: A one-and-a-half hour sitting and, get this, a six-and-a-half hour sitting. Solving Fez’s puzzles managed to be so enthralling that I completely lost track of time, which doesn’t happen often with me. That’s the one thing that really makes Fez stand out, the puzzles are so interesting that you want to keep going and keep playing to see what’s next. Unfortunately, I can’t say much for the endings. Admittedly, I only played enough to see the incomplete ending, and even seeing the 100% ending, I don’t consider either of them very much worth it.

But Fez isn’t about the destination, it’s about the journey. Where it succeeded in motivation, it failed in captivation, and considering its gameplay, I don’t see myself playing this game again anytime soon. I would recommend a rental if it was possible, however, I can at least say the 800-MS point price tag is just right for a one-time playthrough game like Fez.

3 out of 5

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