Fez (PC)

Hi, you've found yourself on Super Adventures, where I play games for an hour or two to figure out what they are and show off some screenshots. I'm bored of 'E' games now, they've gotten old, so I'm moving up to exploit the untapped potential of the letter 'F', starting with puzzle-platformer Fez.

I realise that everyone else on Earth already knows everything about the game already, but it's all completely new to me so I'm playing it anyway. The game debuted on the Xbox 360 in 2012 and for a while seemed happy enough to just stay there and shun the outside world, though it did eventually make its way over to PCs and PlayStations over the next couple of years. I'll be playing it on Windows as that's the version I've got, but I don't expect there'll be any noticeable differences between the systems.

(Click the screenshots if you feel expanding them to their orginal res, though you won't be missing out on any details by leaving them small.)

Okay, there's no long intro for this one. Choosing to start a new game sent me directly into this room, controlling the little white-skinned naked guy currently standing on his bed. He doesn't look all that well-built, but he's a platformer hero so he has enough power in those tiny legs to propel himself all that way up onto that shelf above the door in a single leap, and presumably enough arm strength to hold those massive books one handed, though he refuses to pick of any of them up for me. He won't even use the drum kit, which is a total let down really.

I like the decor in here though; it's definitely making me reconsider purple as a colour for wallpaper. It goes really well with the random fairy lights across the ceiling and that really familiar looking poster over on the right. Man it's going to drive me mad trying to remember where I've seen that image before.

Oh duh, it's the title screen to Final Fantasy!

The Legend of Zelda (NES)

No wait, it's a poster of the title screen of Legend of Zelda on the NES. Uh, obviously.

Hey it's a nice day out, lots of butterflies and and birds flying around. Also that's one hell of a drop off the side; have these people never heard of safety railings? I'm definitely getting a bit of a Cave Story vibe from this town, though I'm sure that's mostly because of the tiny pale-skinned wide-headed townsfolk.

Straight away I was given my first quest: walk up to the mailbox a meter or so to my right. Completing this mission rewarded me with a letter explaining my second quest:

Hey, my dude has a name! I'm honestly surprised for some reason.

I have to respect the artist's decision to stick with the low resolution for this letter even though it's clearly made his job more difficult. The game's got a very consistent and appealing look to it.

Anyway it's Special Day today, so that means I have to get to the top of the village ASAP to meet with Geezer.


SEVERAL JUMPS LATER, AT THE TOP OF THE VILLAGE:

Fascinating.

Well if that's all you called me up here for I guess I'll be going now. I've got a drum kit sitting in my house and I still haven't given up trying to find a way to play the thing. Good day sir.

Okay... what just happened? Is this Geezer's idea of adventure then, being abducted by an alien Tetris cube? If I come back from this missing an eye I'm going to be so pissed off.

I'm sure those symbols there explain that there's a perfectly good reason for all of this (even that unusually orderly semi-symmetrical starfield), but I don't speak alien cube so I'm just going to carry on being confused.

A... fez?

A FEZ!

Wow, now he's wearing a hat that just draws more attention to the fact that he's not wearing any pants. But whatever, this is probably the best outcome I could've expected from this.

Uh, I think I broke the cube. The thing shattered with enough force to damage the code and now it's starting to look like a ZX Spectrum game out here. This usually the point where the screen flashes as a few times and I'm kicked back to BASIC.

Well this is the next best thing I guess. Don't ask me how I got a screenshot of BIOS, I'm just that good.

Hang on, this doesn't look right, something's very wrong with this image. A floppy drive running off a hard drive cable? Absurd!

This screen appears on the Xbox 360 version as well, so it's not something added in new for the PC port. It's a little bit scarier on PC though.

Okay the game's booted back up again, but things aren't quite the same as they used to be. For one thing I can now flip the camera view 90 degrees at a time, even though the world is still a flat 2D platformer level no matter which way you look at it. Also I have a hat now.

This tiny tesseract in front of me introduces himself as Dot and explains that I have to collect and reassemble the scattered fragments of the hexahedron to save the universe from collapse. One question though: what's a hexahedron?

Oh he means that cube I blew up earlier? Well why didn't he just say that! No need to waste four syllables to refer to an object when you can be more specific with just the one. Wow it's only just clicked with me that he basically just revealed that the game is another bloody collect 'em up, as I have to go hunt down a certain number of yellow cubes on each level.

Man it gets dark quickly in this place. I honestly wouldn't have expected Fez of all games to have a day/night cycle. Also Tetris shape constellations in the night sky is a little weird as well.

Gomez is quite a capable platformer protagonist, with a decent jump and the ability to grab hold of ledges and pull himself up. He can even shimmy across the front of ledges, which is a rare talent in a 2D game, though I suppose front and side are the exact same thing from a different point of view in this.

Right now I'm climbing back up through the town, spinning the camera around a few times on each floor to check for secret doors and hidden cubes; like that that one up there for instance!

Hey I found a key in this chest! I was expecting the game to tell me that I needed a key to open it, but this suits me far better this way. I remember seeing a door along with way with a keyhole on it, so I'll go back over there and see if I can open it now.

Breaking and entering is entirely morally justified seeing as the entire universe will collapse if I don't find all these yellow cubes in time. I could try asking people to let me in so I could look around, but Gomez never speaks and NPCs only ever repeat the same few lines to me when I talk to them anyway. There's no voice acting either, but that's no huge surprise.

Hey the key worked! Looks like I've unlocked some kind of boiler room with a floating treasure map in the middle. I'll be taking that I think.

I'm a bit concerned about all these Tetris symbols on the walls though. They're all over the other three walls as well when I spin the camera, and I'm definitely getting the feeling that it's a code I'm meant to be cracking. I'll make a mental note about this place, but I'll stick to finding shiny things for now I think.

Ah, now this house on the other hand has a puzzle I can solve. It also has a photo of a giant stone owl statue and creepy angular spiderwebs, but I'll ignore them for now.

I duck through the fireplace, open the treasure chest and get a second key.


LATER.

And that's the final tiny cube I need to complete my first... cube. I need to find or piece together 32 of these medium sized cubes in order to complete the hexahedron big cube and save the world. It's cubes all the way down in this game.

By the way, see that big yellow diamond in the background? That's actually a ping coming from the block I just grabbed, telling me exactly where it is on the level. These cube fragments aren't always in plain sight but they're impossible to miss, and I very much appreciate that. The game's less about hunting for items and more about finding ways to get them.

Okay, now I have a complete cube I can climb down the vines behind my house and unlock the mysterious door at the bottom of the village! Then the whole world will be mine to explore!

Hey, this seems like a perfect place to show how the perspective changing power affects platforming.

These four floating blocks here aren't actually lined up nearly in a row, but from this camera angle they look like they are, so I can jump across them like this as if they were. Gomez may be aware that the third dimension exists now, but he doesn't have much use for the concept of depth unless it suits his purposes.

Anyway, I get to the top block, hit the right trigger to spin the camera around and...

... from this perspective the top block now looks like it's within jumping distance of where I want to be and I can leap across back to the middle.

Honestly the most interesting part of this to me is how perfect the pixel art looks. This isn't just a 3D world with low res textures, this is basically a true 2D platformer level... except I can spin the camera around it! Everything is so perfectly clean, there's not a trace of distortion to these pixels; there's nothing to break the illusion.

It's a bit of a shame though (to me) that the soundtrack has more modern moody indie game music than classic catchy 16-bit melodies.

Ah, this place is more like the starting village, with a bit of room to explore and plenty of doors. I'll grab that obvious cube over there on the right and then go investigate door #1.


A FEW DOORS LATER.

Crap, I'm getting a few rooms away from that outdoor place now. I keep coming across new places with new doors to investigate and now I don't even know where I am. At least I've found a puzzle I can solve: I need to rotate this block to put the ladder in a place where I can use it to climb up onto that other bit of ladder and claim the golden cube above.

The game reminds me of Portal 2 in that for the most part the puzzles in this have been about as tricky as the platforming for me so far; they're just difficult enough to slow me down without bringing the game to a crashing halt.


LATER.

Wow, I've reached a mini warp gate! These things are handy, because they take me on a one way trip right back to the nearest warp gate hub level, saving me from having to backtrack the whole way.

Wait hang on, I want to backtrack! The bloody game keeps branching at each new map and I haven't explored half the places I've come across yet. I think I'm going to have to check the world map here.

This needlessly complex 3D structure is Fez's world map, which gets filled in and expanded as I go. Fortunately I can at least rotate it in game, which helps.

Alright so I'm at the warp gate hub with the triple hexagonal outline now, but where was I at a second ago? Levels I've completed entirely have a gold border and I'm reasonably sure I got everything on that map, so that narrows it down a little.

You know what this could use? Level numbers.

The Addams Family (SNES)

Also level names! If it's good enough for Jet Set Willy and a certain other fez-wearing hero called Gomez, then it's good enough for Fez. Plus it'd make it much easier for players to compare notes and look things up if they were able to refer to locations by a better label than 'that blue room where you spin the columns with ladders attached to them'.


SOON.

Uh, ignore all that crap I said earlier about all the puzzles being really simple. There's a bell here with a symbol on each side and I haven't got the faintest idea what it means. I can push it from each side to make different sounds, so it's like there's a code I need to figure out, but I wouldn't even know where to begin with that.

There's no way this will be essential to finishing the game though, it's just not that cruel.

You see, there's more than one kind of cube to collect in the game. There's 32 regular golden cubes, and 32 anti-cubes, and it doesn't matter what I get as long as I end up with 32 of something in the end.

Anti-cubes take a bit more thinking to get, but they're not always epic mind-bending problems. In this case I have to pick these four blocks up and and move them so that they form a T shape from one side and an L from the other (the game really loves its tetrominos).

Tada! Another anti-cube for the collection.

Alright that's one room done, now I have to get over to the next door and hope it's not going to take me off to a different level entirely with its own set of doors again.


LATER.

I definitely appreciate how the game often throws something new at me in each level. In this case I've got to leap across invisible blocks that only appear as silhouettes when there's a flash of lightning. This should be annoying, but it really isn't. I guess it helps that I can still see rain bouncing off them if I look carefully.

Falling too far is an instant kill, but seeing as I have infinite lives and instantly respawn back at the last safe place I was standing that's actually a good thing. It means that if I slip I won't have to start jumping back up from the bottom again.


SOME TIME LATER.

Hang on, this is new. I don't remember there being tears in the fabric of space and time on these levels last time I was here. Seems that getting around is going to be a bit harder than it used to be.

By the way, if you look down on the right you can see that bell tower I was at a few screenshots ago in the background. That's a big clue that if I go through that door down there, that's likely to be the level I'll end up on. In fact now that the door's been opened, I can actually spy the next level through it if I walk up to it.


LATER.

Oh, I guess not every level's gotten harder. This place hasn't even got a single obstacle or problem to solve. It's just an abandoned micro-city, filled with clues, codes and mysteries. Plus a giant neon owl sign on one of the other sides, because why not? Man this game is crying out for a developer's commentary to explain some of this stuff.

The clues in this place are even more frustrating than I thought they'd be. I mean look at this, it's practically spelling out the solution to this puzzle step by step, and that just makes it so much worse when I still can't get it.


AN UNSPECIFIED AMOUNT OF TIME LATER.

Oh I definitely get this particular 'puzzle' though.

Well I don't have a smartphone, but fortunately I'm playing the PC version so it's little effort for me to take the screenshot and put it through a QR reader website. Or I suppose I could just type in 'fez qr code' and skip the pointless work.

It's entirely skippable though (unless you're going for 100% completion) and apparently you can solve the puzzle through a different clue anyway, so it's not a huge issue.


TIME PASSES.

Oh shit, I've wandered into the ZX Spectrum version by mistake. Well there's no attribute clash and a see a few blocks there sharing more than two colours, but this is definitely inspired by one of those 80s 8-bit microcomputers I'm sure of it.

You know, somehow I'm getting the impression that the designer wasn't being entirely serious when he famously tweeted "BOO HOO. PCs are for spreadsheets," back in the day. This is definitely been made by someone who's played a few computer games in their day (just not Jet Set Willy or Manic Miner apparently).

Oh crap, I'm in a Virtual Boy level now? That's just... harsh, man.

Plus, to add insult to eye-strain, I've been given an actual platforming challenge this time, with a time limit. The whole thing seems like an optional room for masochists, but I'm determined to see it through, no matter how many times I get catapulted into the rising lava by mistiming my jump on these rotating platforms and have to replay the entire level from the start again.

Actually bollocks to it, this isn't any fun for me at all, and just reinforces what a smart idea it was to make the rest of the levels so chilled out. There aren't even any enemies in this game! I haven't found a single hostile creature in the entire time I've been playing it, and it's not any worse for their absence.

Man, just as I was starting to get annoyed with the game I manage to unlock first person view and suddenly... holy shit, I just want to run around all the levels again seeing everything in 3D! In fact fuck that, I want to run around SNES games and do this. Someone needs to go and remake all the 16-bit classics and add a first person view immediately.

Oh, also I managed to finish the entire game, so I guess I'll stop here.


CONCLUSION

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I suppose my preconception of Fez was that it was going to be an awkward, pretentious game that was more about experiencing the environments and struggling through puzzles than old-fashioned platforming action. Something between Myst and La-Mulana I guess is the image I had in my head, which is dumb because I haven't even played Myst before. I shouldn't even be getting images about that.

Anyway what I'm leading up to here, is that the game really isn't that at all. It's a low-stress, light-hearted platformer with a lot of charm and a few puzzles, designed to be breezed through in a day or so. Well, unless you want to see all your rooms marked in gold that is, because after a point you gotta start working for it. There's clues to decipher, pillars to decode, owls to chat with, lava to outrun, and if you want to take it one step further you could always translate every bit of alien dialogue into English and figure out the backstory as well.

The biggest problem I had with the game, is that even with the warp gates at the center of each hub (and the shortcut doors) it was still a pain in the ass to get back to old levels to grab the stuff I'd missed. Plus it sure would be nice if the places had names! Thankfully the game lets you know which doors you haven't been through and what items you're missing in each area, so finding all the cube is about as painless as possible.

Basically it's a cool game, so consider it recommended unless you're after a platformer that demands some actual skill and practice.

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