Initial Impressions is not meant to be a review. Instead, it’s a structured stream-of-consciousness piece detailing my observances, complaints, and revelations after experiencing different forms of media.
Video by Howcast Gaming
FEZ is one of the most polarizing experiences I’ve ever had with a video game. At once, it’s an inventive puzzle-platformer but it’s also an excruciating experience.
FEZ stars Gomez, a little creature who lives in the 2nd dimension. One day, Gomez meets with one of his elders who awards him a fez that allows Gomez to rotate the 2D plane (by hitting the left or right trigger buttons if using XBOX controller) and to view the world from a different perspective of the 2D plane. The entire layout of the screen can change completely and platforms you couldn’t reach before are now within your grasp. Ultimately, you are tasked with locating little cubes that are hidden throughout every location or obtained after figuring out some mind-bendingly complicated puzzles. Collect 8 of ‘em and you form a bigger cube. Collect 32 of these cubes and you complete the main story. Collect the remaining 32 cubes and you complete the game.
The collection aspect can be really addictive. FEZ ingeniously places several cubes in one area and places them just out of reach and you do everything you can to grab each and every cube. There are many doors within a single section which leads to more doors and so on. You track your progress using the map and if you’ve completed an area, your space will become gold. You can spend hours and hours diving further and further into FEZ’s world, basking the comfortable, pixel-motif art style that can be compared with a visual living room, not meant to be too stimulating or flashy, just pleasant. The same can be said for the music, which isn’t as memorable as other games but isn’t meant to be. It’s another element that stabilizes and relaxes you, like classical music in a waiting room. Each world presents its own challenges and uses of the flipping-dimensions mechanic like platforms disappearing and reappearing depending on the lighting strikes in the background or using a bomb to reach a higher area but continuing to flip dimensions so that the blast can continue without interruption. Throughout the adventure, you notice how there are inaccessible areas like a lighthouse that’s just out of reach or how a rope ladder leads into the ocean and there’s the faint hint that there is more to explore than what can be currently. In my play-through, this is where FEZ lost me.
FEZ harkens back to the days of the NES when games were meant to be played until the cartridge burned out from exhaustion. The exploration is meant to engage players directly with the environment to uncover the secrets of the game. Sometimes, the secrets were rewarding like finding the warp whistle in Super Mario Bros. 3, and sometimes the secrets were necessary to completing the game. Wait, what?
Later in the game, you find a lost civilization of characters who look just like Gomez except that you can’t understand any of them. Each of them talk in a block language and because you don’t understand what they’re saying, you rummage through their homes, collect any cubes that you can, and move on. Except that…you can communicate with them. You just have to decipher their language.
Playing FEZ the first time, you would only be seeking out the cubes you can see since that’s what the game is telling you to do. Find the cubes, save the world. Simple. But after getting stuck in a certain section, I was baffled when people mentioned “how to decipher the FEZ language” as part of their walkthrough. This is evidence that players are capable of solving FEZ’s riddle but let me explain why this is a huge fault in FEZ’s gameplay. As I stated before, your mission is to collect cubes. You can take as much time to collect the cubes and even if you die, you respawn immediately so there’s no immediate pressure from the game. However, you mentally focus on just collecting cubes. So on the occasion that you walk into a room and walk out after not finding any cubes, would it ever occur to you that the secrets to deciphering FEZ’s language are on the walls of some of these rooms? The other problem is backtracking. FEZ occasionally has portals that can send you back to places you have already visited but it doesn’t simplify your overall task of going through every single room in order to decipher FEZ’s language. Once you have, you can finally go back to the rope ladder I mentioned earlier, enter in the button combinations indicated by the symbols on the wall, activate the water pump that lowers the water level, and finally continue your adventure. Then there’s the other 32 cubes which are simply not worth your time. If you thought deciphering FEZ’s language was a Herculean task, the puzzles in the post-game are too cryptic to complete. Sometimes, FEZ has vague hints in a room to complete each puzzle and sometimes it’s just randomness, for example, a bell puzzle where you have play the notes in a specific way that you only figure out after constant trial and error. You could spend anywhere from a few minutes to an hour trying to solve these puzzles.
FEZ is the definition of missed potential. A game with an intriguing premise of switching through dimensions that has to be boggled down by a contradicting premise of deciphering a language. In today’s world of digital downloads and annual releases, it seems very difficult to want to stick to a single game for that much time to satisfyingly uncover every necessary secret it has. FEZ, by that definition, accomplishes what it set out to do, to remind us of the era of old-school gaming, of making a simple premise unnecessarily complicated, ramping up the difficulty to prematurely extend game length, and having little to no reward or satisfaction for completing the game. You are capable of completing FEZ, but you will feel empty inside once you have.
Sources: FEZ, published by PolyTron; "Super Mario Bros. 3 Warp Whistles - All 3" YouTube video by EmeraldLantern2814; "Fez Playthrough Part 1 [No Commentary / HD / Xbox 360]" YouTube video by Howcast Gaming; wikipedia.org
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