Geekscape Games Reviews Fez
Fez, the latest indie games darling, has been cooking for quite some time. 5 years to be exact. With all that developer Phil Fish went through to in the process of releasing Fez, the hype is in full effect. How does this hype hold up when I sit down to play Fez? One word: “almost”.
Fez puts you in control of Gomez, a lovable, marshmallow-like individual who is tasked with donning the all mighty Fez to save your people and the world from collapsing into time. The Fez grants you powers to rotate and shift the world in order to solve puzzles as well as traverse the environment.
I love how well the game looks and feels like a 2-D game yet is actually a 3-D game. There’s very smart design in how you must think in 3-D while staring at 2-D. My first couple of hours with Fez had me wearing a smile on my face with feelings of the perfect amount of nostalgia I got from the retro-style atmosphere. Cave Story fans will be in love instantly. Even the music was soothing to hear during the areas you explore. The music really brought out the feelings of what it was like to play Echo The Dolphin. I know, it’s not an 8-bit game but damned if I didn’t have flashbacks to Echo The Dolphin when the music first hit my ears.
A couple more hours in and frustration and a sense of hopelessness settled in. For the most part, the puzzles are laid out for you as easy as a Sunday morning. The real challenges comes in the form of trying to make sense of just what Fez wants you to do in the later puzzles. Tasked with collecting gold bits, in later levels when these become a gold cube, they just become more scarce and you become worried that you are not smart enough to solve these more intricate puzzles. Simplicity is a good thing when used correctly but on later stages Fez seems to have overdone it. I was literally left in a world of unintuitive puzzles with little hint or direction, and after hours of playing the game, just exploring the world isn’t enough. Having some sort of feedback or indication system would have saved me a lot of self-doubt and aimless depression.
If some of this hassle was left to the pure completionists that wanted to purue the anti-cubes that are locked behind these advanced mind crushers, I could easily overlook it. But having these puzzles be a required hindrance to actually completing the game is plain terrible. You get a useless map of sorts but that’s not doing Fez any favors in the confusion department. I hated the backtracking that was mostly caused by the poor layout of the map. Not knowing where each door takes me until Gomez is hovering over the entrance is annoying. When looking for the last golden cube needed to get to the end of the game, I was lost for what seemed like an hour trying to find it. By pure luck, I managed to stumble on the last area where the elusive golden cube resided.
The ending had so many crazy shapes flying at me I felt as though I was watching someone’s art project turned screensaver. Afterwards, a nice nod to old school arcades happens. Most should get the reference but if not, it’s very easily figured out if you peruse the achievements. Fez does an amazing thing with the mechanics of shifting the 2-D world to traverse the world and solve puzzles. The music is subtle enough yet soothing at times making it a blast to engage with the environment. I just feel as though Fez was not satisfying enough in the accomplishments I did versus the anger-inducing frustration that I experienced; obtuse puzzles and the lag spikes causing the music to sound garbled and the gameplay skipped just enough to ruin precision jumps that I was in the middle of. Playing Fez just to see its concept and design is not a bad idea, just don’t believe all of the hype (almost).
