Fez

Pixellated white character wearing a fez, leaping ecstatically at a 3-D golden cube

Late last week, I got the latest Humble Bundle (this one was another Indie-games Bundle, so of course I had to get on board). Humble Bundles are a pack of cross-platform games where you get to choose how much to pay. By default, most goes to the devs, some goes to Humble, and some goes to charity — but you also get to choose how to split the proceeds, so you could give it all to the devs, all to Humble, or all to charity. And if you give more than the average, you get extra games. One of those extra games was something I was particularly interested in — a little indie game called Fez.

This post will be EXTREMELY spoiler-heavy, so if you are looking to enjoy puzzle games with clever twists, go get it now and close this browser window. I’m serious. Then come back when you think you’re done, once you’ve collected your measley 32 cubes and “finished” the game, because you’re just getting started.

I was already in love with the aesthetic of the game having seen just a few screenshots, insofar as it honestly doesn’t take much to appeal to my retro gamer sensibilities — just make it pixelly and give it a bright palette, and I’m likely to like it. But until I played it, I knew precious little else about it, except that it was an indie game, and that a number of people I knew to enjoy games thought it was fairly clever. And I didn’t know how far down the rabbit hole I was going to go.

At first, I was deceived. It was just a cute retro platformer where you have to collect the pieces of a shattered hexahedron — that is, a golden cube that apparently has the ability to endow flat-land 2D pixel art characters with the knowledge and ability to move in three dimensions. But just when the initial novelty of the ability to flip a flat 2D world along the third dimension, so as to gain access to platforms and items that are normally unreachable from other views thanks to parallaxing, was just starting to wear off, that’s when I learned that there was actually so very much more to the game.

When you first start the game, an old adventurer living in your village — the only village you’ve ever known your whole life, of course — calls you up to the uppermost platform. The old coot is wearing a fez and an eyepatch. He tells you it’s almost time for your adventure, any second now… and then a three-dimensional cube appears above you, strangely enough, despite this world being entirely flat. And a hypercube folds through it in the foreground as it whisks you off to some alien starscape.

The cube says a bunch of stuff in this strange boxy language that you can’t make heads nor tails of. It turns out, there’s a lot of this language scattered throughout the game. Later, you’ll find a stone tablet in a lovely wooded glade, and in front of it is a little pixellated fox leaping back and forth over a lazy dog.

If you’re at all smart about these types of games, you’re going to figure out in a hurry that the tablet is a Rosetta Stone, which says “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, and there you are — you have the alphabet. You’re just starting to scratch the surface, at that point. I spent a few hours retraversing parts of the game, including starting a new game in a new slot just so I could translate the opening speech by the hexahedron. There’s a ton of backstory in this game, all available through a few scattered quotes and interesting pieces of signage, some of which you have to piece together from observation.

But that’s not the only cipher in the game. If you pay attention to the artifacts and some of the signage in the game, you’ll figure out a numbering system, too. You’ll discover that there’s a whole other system for entering secret codes in front of doors and obelisks, where the input you enter as you wander around a room is actually reflected on a big light board that represents your moving around, jumping and rotating the room as tetriminos — “Tetris pieces”, arrangements of four squares. There’s another room with a chalk board that explains that the strange pixelly markings you find on some doors is actually a set of these tetriminos, jammed together and turned ninety degrees to the right. And to open these doors, you have to enter the codes on your controller or keyboard like you were entering a cheat code on a classic video game.

But you’ll be very tempted, if you’re any sort of puzzle game fan, to never cheat. If you manage to solve all the puzzles without cheating, you’re better than I. There are, in this game, three super-puzzles that don’t count toward your regular cube count, though they do count toward completion of the game. They’re… ridiculous, actually. Just absolutely ridiculous. Let me tell you about them.

One is a “security question” that amounts to writing out a name, which your hypercube companion Dot doesn’t remember. There’s a password hint, though. That hint doesn’t help much — “My first half is what it is, my second half is half of what made it.” I guessed the first part correctly but had to look up the second part. That “what made it”, it turns out, is referring to the game’s developer, Polytron. It was a pretty rough puzzle, but inputting it was almost as rough, where you have six cubes available to you, each of which has one orientation of one of the six foundational letters that make up the alphabet. This alphabet is made up of six characters in all four orientations, making it extra difficult — you have to turn to the correct orientation of the letter, pick the block up, then turn back the way you want it to go. But don’t turn too quickly, or you’ll actually turn the cube above your head. What’s more, I’ve gotten them somewhat stuck slightly askew above my head, meaning they don’t line up properly and you’ll have to input that puzzle again later. Or throw the cube over the edge and let it respawn.

That’s only one of the three. One of them I accidentally got by brute force, jamming on the left and right triggers in the Observatory, though there’s apparently a set of twinkling stars you can view through the telescope to create a snippet of binary. The left star blinks for 0, the right star blinks for 1, but they go so fast that you can’t get the whole code down on paper unless you record it or are some sort of machine yourself. To make matters worse, you don’t get the whole code in one chunk, as you have to wait for nightfall to even see the stars, and it doesn’t last long enough to get the whole sequence. Once you do get the whole sequence, and you may not know you’ve completed it through a few cycles, you can then convert it from binary to ascii, and it’s a sequence of left and right trigger presses. As I said, I lucked out with this one when I just started jamming on left and right trigger in frustration and surprised myself when it worked.

And the third puzzle is no better than those two — it’s one of those absolutely ridiculous show-stopper puzzles involving standing in the right place, inputting a code that you found on a treasure map… then you get your reward, a giant black monolith. Only that’s not the whole reward. There’s another spot where you could stand in that room, and the map you used to get the monolith suggests that there’s something else you need to do to get the reward — only that half of the map is burned up. There are absolutely no other clues in the game world. Except, that is, for a tome full of haikus that you can translate, but that appears to STILL be cyphered somehow after you’ve translated it. Another layer is that the pages apparently have to be read in a particular order.

Theoretically, this is one of those unfair puzzles. In practice, it was fairly easy — relatively speaking, of course — for a group of dedicated gamers to brute force. However, the REAL path to the puzzle involved some out-of-game knowledge that I never would have come up with on my own.

First off, it depends on your knowing the date that the game came out on X-Box Live. Then it just gets way more obscure from there.

I thoroughly enjoyed this game, even where I had to cheat to beat the uber puzzles. It ate my weekend, and I don’t feel the worse for it. Though I did fill two pages of notebook paper with insane scribblings and haikus about space and time. More spoilers in it, but if you’re interested, here’s a picture of my notes.

feznotes

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Fez
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9 thoughts on “Fez

  1. 1

    Groupees has a good game bundle going on right now. Indiegala does them, IndieRoyale, and BundleStars has SEVEN bundles going.
    Tons of good games cheap, most on Steam, some on Desura or whatever.

    There are usually at least 3 new bundles a week with prices from $1 to $5 or so.
    Steam ID: JafafaHots

  2. 2

    Though it’ll probably show up in a Humble Bundle sometime soon, La Mulana just went on sale on Steam for the week, for $3. If you don’t already have it, I’d recommend picking it up. The puzzles tend to be more ‘Read a hint in location A, realize it relates to location B halfway across the ruins, follow the hint, set off a trap, escape the trap’ than ‘decode this langauge, do what it says’, but it’s a ton of fun.

  3. 3

    FEZ is freaking amazing. I got it during the steam Summer of Sales event for a few dollars, and it was amazing to play. Stopped after a while because it really is meant to be played with a controller, and I need to figure out how to use my xbox one on my PC.

  4. 5

    Had a very similar experience. Loved this game…might even play it again. I took almost as many notes as you did, and I also didn’t complete it without assistance – but I was so desperate to do so that I spent more than a weekend on this game. The clock tower timing was probably the most annoying, personally.

  5. 6

    Hah, yeah, the clock tower thing, once I figured out that one of them was spinning fast enough to cycle every minute, the rest was all just figuring out the periodicity and mucking with my system time because damned if I was going to wait a full week for one lousy anticube.

  6. 7

    Indeed, seem pretty cool. I tend to like the sorts of games the include puzzles, but aren’t 100% puzzle-games.

    There was one that made me pretty nuts, a numbers-in-a-pattern puzzle. Turned out there was more than one valid (but unsuccessful) arrangement of numbers for the damn thing.

    Also, Myst. lol

  7. 8

    Hmm I might just get this. FEZ looked interesting but I already have FTL, hadn’t heard of any of the other games.

    The Humble Bundle is amazing though, especially because EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) is one of the charities.

    Oh yeah, I didn’t read most of the post because I’m thinking about playing this, but from what I can tell, this reminds me a lot of this olllllld browser-based puzzle game. Relied on a ton of outside knowledge, using things like your sound recorder that comes with Windows, etc. It was foreign I think ahh but I can’t for the life of me remember it.

  8. 9

    Right now I’m playing through Zork Nemesis, I got for like 2 dollars off of GoG (Good Ole Games) website like a couple of months ago, along with a few other games. I was working my way through Blood II Chosen, and will have to finish it at some point, although the game became super unbalanced at the first boss so I may not bother as that broke the rhythm of the game for me. I also have The Longest Journey installed and ready to go. I loved Myst and Riven and spent about 6 months on them, back when I was like 16 years old, but most puzzle games can’t hold my attention =/
    Zork Nemesis is pretty good so far, and I got stuck on Warcraft II Black Portal expansion pack, after beating Tides of Darkness main campaign, because I suck at RTS, plus the CD started refusing to work. Up on the horizon is some Diablo 2 Classic, and, eventually, I hope to work my way through Diablo 1 through all difficulties, because Diablo 1 is my favorite multiplayer game ever. Of course most of my time is consumed trying to get better at Chess through correspondence chess atm, hoping I can convert that into some kind of extremely part time teaching freelance work years down the road.

    I get steam sales for like few bucks every now and then, it’s nice ^.^

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