Fez

Why do I always get the tricky ones? Oh hey Fordham, here’s Fez, just knock up a 500-word review of this pixelcore, genre-subverting, n+1 dimensional platform adventurer which also includes a rich story, lots of gaming culture references and, oh yes, a cipher and cryptographic layer that DEFIED THE ENTIRE INTERNET for more than a week. That’s like, the whole of the internet. Couldn’t solve the last puzzle. A week.

(PS: Duke Nukem Forever mod? Yeah – that gets two pages.)

Damn I’m already a fifth of the way through the review. Okay, so if you’ve played Fez on Xamabox, then Fez has finally come home. This is an intimate game where you pour your very mind into the machine to either best its many layers, or to wander lost through its often haunting and surprisingly biologically rich nonsense landscapes. I played it at 2560 x 1440. Suck on that Xamabox.

Of course this is a game of discovery and wonder and if you have indeed done the cipher cryptography thing already, then the value of Fez on PC is directly proportional to how red those rings of death are on your console. Or maybe just how much you want to replay it.

For the rest of us, this is a PC game at its core. It always was. Hell, its glitch-aesthetic even explicitly references POST and BIOS in the first five minutes of play. I actually had to look up whether that bit had been specially changed for the PC version, but no – it’s there on Xbox too.

Quick precis (my favourite kind) – little dude, magic hat, 2D world denying existence of third dimension, mystical hexahedron, explosiums!, no the game hasn’t crashed, OMG can rotate view!, hubs, collect cubes, unlock doors, progress.

A lesser developer than Phil Fish and Polytron would have high-fived the 2D-3D rotation idea (which is very good) and banged out a cute little puzzle-platformer. But no. Fish had to go further. He had to go PC on his own game’s ass. The development of Fez was so protracted, so painful and litigious, the tale sits happily alongside the misfortunes of Dr Derek Smart and other PC mavens. Crucial difference: Fez is awesome.

It’s not just a puzzle platformer. Well, I mean it IS, but some of those puzzles require a notepad, a keen eye, and access to a mainframe for brute-force cracking of various ciphers and codes. Your final score is expressed as a percentage, and currently the highest percentage people seem to be able to legitimately get is 212.5%. But that might be because of a glitched 33rd anticube. Any questions?

Look, this is a masterpiece by any measure, especially BECAUSE it nearly destroyed Phil Fish’s life. Yes, the internet has ruined the puzzles, but in Polytron’s own words: “Play it like the internet doesn’t exist.” And on a beefy machine in full HD. Trans-dimensional physics, cryptography, secret languages, stereograms, awesome hats – if people criticise Fez because of how you can sometimes fall off a thing even though you dint mean to because of the controls, why, simply hold up one hand as if gripping a cube, make a rotating gesture AND THEN PUNCH THEM IN THEIR STUPID FACE.