Fez (2012)

Cover by Bryan Lee O’Malley, creator of Scott Pilgrim.

To say that I'd been waiting a while for this game would be the understatement of the year. It's difficult to remember exactly when I first heard of it, given that it was announced around the same time as some other games with the same perspective changing concept I think it's fair to say that the art style was a big part of what kept me interested in it over the past 5 years. It started to take on almost mythical status as a game that might never see the light of day, with very sporadic updates on its progress leaking out. When your game idea is copied in an online flash game before its release, you must really know that you're taking a long time on something.

Funnily enough, for a long time I was expecting a game like that Sky Island clone, where it would be quite strictly level based. While some of the trailers hinted at a more open world I still went into Fez not really knowing how freeform it would be. I quickly found myself heading through door after door that lead to completely new areas and not really knowing how to get back. There was something quite exciting about this, it felt like you were really going on an adventure and falling down a rabbit hole that you might not come back from. I knew that some kind of warp gate would probably turn up to help you get around quicker but until you find one (well, two actually) there's definitely a sense of getting lost in a pixelated foreign land.

Sadly I didn't really find navigating this world as much fun as I had hoped though, due to its laggy and unresponsive controls. The old school visuals suggested to me that playing it would also feel like an old school platformer with tight and responsive controls but I would constantly feel like I wasn't fully in control and that actions like dropping down ledges or picking up boxes were a little inconsistent. I'm usually one to give games the benefit of the doubt when people complain about low frame rates but in this case I'm pretty sure that the laggy controls were largely down to the poor overall performance of the game. There is a section near the end where the detail gets really low and suddenly the controls got more responsive and the motion appeared smoother, I would have loved to have played the whole game with the responsiveness that this section allowed you a brief glance of. This wasn't exactly helped by some strange button choices, with X and B performing two separate actions that felt like they should have been one button and pause/inventory screens on the Back, Start and Y buttons!

It's difficult to know whether much blame for performance issues can be put on XNA, Microsoft's game development tools, which were used to create this. I've touched on this idea before, that using such a high level language must leave little room for optimisation after a certain point but it seems different with this being a full Xbox Live Arcade release and not just an Indie game which XNA is most commonly used for. To me it seems like the higher price point and level of polish expected should perhaps have lead to the game being ported to a different system that would allow better use of the Xbox's capabilities if they had reached the limits of XNA but if that was the case I imagine we would still be waiting for the game's release right now. Aside from the performance issues there were also numerous crashes and glitches like falling out of the world in small areas that should really have been caught beforehand. I have managed to avoid the issue that forces you to restart the whole game from the beginning but some friends were not so lucky. A patch for the crashes should be incoming but I doubt that there will be much that can be done to improve or stabilize its performance.

I have other issues with the game but these feel more like my personal preferences, rather than legitimate criticism. You'll quickly realise that the basic platforming and perspective shifting is only half of the game, with the majority of it centred around more abstract puzzles to find 'anti-cubes' and translating its language and numbering system. I've managed to find a few of these anti-cubes, some via cool solutions like scanning an in game QR code and another by building Tetris shapes in all four perspectives but the rest quickly started to feel like they were outside of my realm of comprehension. My preference would be for the game to help you out a little more but for others the lack of any pointers is clearly part of its appeal, revelling in the old school nature of making your own maps and noting down the strange symbols to piece together the clues littered throughout the game.

As it stands I feel like I'm in this weird limbo where I don't really have the time or patience to figure out all of its mysteries myself but I don't want to just go and find all of the answers on the internet either. Following the progress of other players on internet forums is perhaps a less explicit way of finding answers and sometimes just following someone else's thinking can help you to come to your own conclusions. I'm still not sure that I will ever find everything in this game without some serious help though and its basic ending doesn't seem to offer any explanation of what it was all about (though it is a suitably mind bending conclusion). Even if translating the language is not integral to finding any of the anti-cubes, I would still have liked there to have been some way of showing the translated text in game, rather than referring to your notes or some kind of website/app for a character by character translation.

Despite all this, the game does a great job of keeping you playing, sometimes purely because of how charming the whole experience is. It's filled to the brim with neat touches, references to other games and even internet memes. Even if you don't solve all of the puzzles they still add to the game's atmosphere and the feeling of a world that you don't quite understand. It's a great experience that I think almost anyone can enjoy to some degree but not everyone will get as much out of it. I guess I'm just a little saddened that it didn't grab me as much as it has done others when I've been waiting so long for it.