Rating of
4.5/5
My God, it’s Full of Cubes!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/22/14
“FEZ” is the magnum opus of “Indie Game: The Movie” star, Phil Fish and his Indie development outfit, Polytron. Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock has either heard or seen Phil Fish doing something controversial, whether it’s declaring that “FEZ” would never receive a non-Xbox Live version because ‘PCs are for spreadsheets,’ or responding to a Japanese developer at a Q&A panel with ‘your games suck,’ or parading around in metaphorical white knight armor in defense of the Feminist side of the Gamergate controversy due to the fact that Zoe Quinn served as one of “FEZ’s” beta testers. The guy even manages to come across as the least sane Indie dev during his segments in “Indie Game: The Movie.”
Of course, the Internet is a Hate Machine and loves to dogpile on anyone who shows even a hint of weakness or a single character flaw. When someone shows as many human flaws in such a short time as Phil Fish, they are setting themselves up as a walking target. Fish’s more controversial comments don’t even ring true, when one considers that “FEZ” was released on Steam and was clearly inspired by the unabashed quirkiness of Japanese games that saved the entire medium in the ‘80s while Atari was trying to exploit it to death with licensed tie-in garbage. When it comes to Phil Fish’ sanity, I don’t really consider him to be any weirder than Shigeru Miyamoto. In order to create truly great games that also function as artistic statements, it takes an unique mind. Other forms of media celebrate their not-quite-normal creators and have elevated the likes of Pablo Picasso and Van Gogh to godlike status. I don’t think we should go that far in elevating Phil Fish, it should go without question by anyone with taste that “FEZ” is one of the most creative and thoughtful games to come out of the Indie scene in quite some time.
Presentation
“FEZ” gives the impression of being one of the many retro-styled side-scrollers being churned out of the Indie development scene lately. At first glance, everything in the game seems to be composed of simple, flat sprites and big pixels. This is an illusion, however, as only the characters are actually sprites. The environments are all fully 3D polygonal objects with sprites painted over them as textures. Regardless of sprite or polygon, everything in the game is simply designed and vibrantly colored, making the game quite pleasant to look at.
The audio in “FEZ” is pleasantly retro-styled as well. The soundtrack is a bit underplayed, however, allowing the sound effects to stand out for once. Whether providing simple audio cues or tying into the games many puzzles, it’s nice to see sound effects used for something more than they usually are.
Story
“FEZ” tells an odd and surreal tale that is a combination of the novella “Flatland” and the novel/movie “2001.” Our hero, a little, white dude named Gomez, lives in a 2D village with a number of other little, white folks who speak a clumsy dialect of English. One day, the one-eyed village elder invites Gomez to the top of the village and announces, “It’s Gomez time!” before a mysterious Cube appears and begins babbling gibberish at our hero. The Cube grants Gomez a hat – the titular Fez – then something goes horribly wrong… and the universe crashes. When the universe reboots, Gomez discovers that he can comprehend the formerly-mythical third dimension, which allows him to discover all manner of mysteries within his simple village that are hidden from the two dimensional eyes of the other townsfolk… including a way out.
Thus Gomez sets out into the unknown, accompanied by a small, rainbow-hued polygon that seems to be part of the great Cube that granted Gomez his Fez before malfunctioning. His mission: To recover the lost fragments of the great Cube and restore the universe to full working order. As he explores the mysterious world outside his village, Gomez encounters the ruins of various stages of civilization, marked with a variety of mysterious glyphs and symbols. In order to figure out what is going on and recover the Cube fragments, Gomez must decipher his world’s lost history. Unfortunately, his polygonal sidekick has lost its memory and is of little assistance.
“FEZ’s” story isn’t so much narrative as it is atmospheric and abstract. Even the ending sequence is an abstract display that doesn’t resolve any of the non-existent plot points so much as it shows the player the grander scheme of the world of “FEZ” and Gomez’ place in it. It’s a reflective attempt at making the player think about their own place in the universe, and as such it is a complete success. The only complaint I have about “FEZ” from a narrative perspective is that the in-game linguistic glyphs are never auto-translated, even after completing the game and starting a New Game+.
Gameplay
“FEZ” is equal parts platformer and puzzle. However, both platforming and puzzle elements are further divided in half, with half of the platforming and puzzling blended into a series of spatial puzzles that challenge the player’s perception of 2D/3D space, while the remaining half of the platforming is pure dexterity and the remaining half of the puzzles are hardcore cryptographic analysis.
“FEZ” has a simple control scheme. The d-pad moves Gomez up/down/left/right, A makes him jump, X lets him grab onto and interact with a few specific bits of the environment, Y opens the inventory, B lets Gomez talk to his sidekick polygon in certain locations, and the L/R triggers/bumpers rotate the polygonal world 90 degrees in the corresponding direction. The game world is made up of a large number of interconnected rooms, each of which serves as a stand-alone stage hiding a number of Cube parts as well as a few treasure chests containing treasure maps or artifacts that aid in solving puzzles. The player progresses through the game by collecting set numbers of Cubes and/or Anti-Cubes to unlock doors leading to different branching paths through the map.
Because everything in the world of “FEZ” is cube-shaped, rotating the world shows the player one of four sides in any given area, sometimes lining up platforms that don’t look like they would otherwise meet, sometimes lining up platforms that would otherwise be on opposite sides of the scene, and sometimes revealing unseen doors, ladders, and whatnot. From a purely platforming perspective, “FEZ” is already an incredibly unique and engaging experience due to the world-rotation mechanic, despite being an incredibly laid-back take on the platforming genre with no enemies to avoid and no lives system to put pressure on the player to perform perfectly on the first attempt.
Where “FEZ” goes even further to provide a unique experience is with the tri-fold system of cryptography through which most of the game’s Anti-Cubes are uncovered. Unfortunately, this obsession with cryptography is also where “FEZ” jumps the shark a bit an moves into catering to a niche audience. The first of the three cryptographic systems in “FEZ” is a series of “Tetris” block-shaped symbols that correspond to controller inputs (as revealed by an ancient structure in one of the stages). The second is a bizarre counting system that uses 6 different symbols (as revealed by a counting cube artifact) rotated 4 different ways to represent the numbers 0-10 (with overlap between the symbols leading to some numbers with multiple written expressions). The third is a less-bizarre, but still tedious writing system that uses 6 different symbols (as revealed by a writing cube artifact) rotated 4 different ways to create all the letters of the Roman alphabet.
Out of these three cryptographic systems, the “Tetris” block system is the only one that I felt had enough in-game explanation. Both the counting and writing systems feel less like attempts by Phil Fish to make a clever puzzle game than attempts by Phil Fish to show how big Phil Fish’s brain is. I’ve never understood the need for quirky, eccentric artists to write their journals in cypher, but that is pretty much what Fish did with “FEZ.” Outside of the residents of Gomez’ village and the polygon sidekick, all of the text in “FEZ” is written in ‘Fez-Speak,’ including that spoken by the great Cube at the beginning of the game. Hints on how to transliterate and count properly are scattered all over the game as posters or engravings on walls and monoliths, forcing the player to keep a pile of handwritten notes nearby in order to help decipher these things. Once a player figures out that the seemingly-irrelevant symbols they passed an hour ago were actually a clue about how to count or translate, it leads to a lot of tedious backtracking into previously-cleared areas in order to assemble clues that STILL lead to a bunch of tedious transliteration on paper in order to actually understand the clues (and heaven forbid a player doesn’t speak English, as that is the underlying language of the Fez-Speak script).
Ultimately, it IS possible to complete “FEZ” without mastering the counting and writing systems, but it is not possible to find all of the hidden goodies in the game without them. The worst part is that all three of these cryptographic systems would make sense if the in-game clues for writing and counting were as clearly defined as the one for “Tetris” blocks.
Overall
While most Indie games are content to milk nostalgia and draw in players with antiquated presentation and gameplay, “FEZ” only uses its retro stylings as a coat of paint on the surface of an entirely unique gameplay experience that masterfully combines spatial puzzles with cryptography. Unfortunately, in designing the cryptographic cyphers, developer Phil Fish jumped the shark a bit and made a game that can come off as somewhat opaque and frustrating. With just a bit more refinement of the in-game clues, “FEZ” would have been absolutely perfect. As it is, it’s still an incredibly fun, thought-provoking, and wildly creative experience that exemplifies the Indie games movement.
Presentation: 5/5
Story: 4.5/5
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Overall (not an average): 4.5/5
