Press Any Key: FEZ
In this entry of PRESS ANY KEY, Rob tackles the puzzle platformer FEZ and discovers some secrets about the game that are hidden in plain sight. The most noticeable being that the real puzzles in the game have nothing to do with spinning the world around, and around, and around. PRESS ANY KEY is not a review, per se. It is an initial opinion of a game that is currently being played by the writer as well as a video of some portion of that game, usually the first 1 to 2 hours of gameplay. It is designed to give the author a chance to speak about certain elements of the game without making a definitive judgement too early on in the the author’s playthrough of the game. Without further ado, here is the PRESS ANY KEY on FEZ.
FEZ is a game that is designed with a certain amount of deception in mind. It’s a kind of deception that is apparent after only 10 minutes of play. It’s the kind of thing games don’t do, maybe they never did it. FEZ is designed to make you think it’s a puzzle game, with platforming being the puzzle. But FEZ really is the puzzle. The whole game is a cypher waiting to be decoded. And the more you play FEZ, the more you’ll realize everything you’re trying to achieve, is only the first part of a much larger, much harder, and much more confusing game. So what is FEZ? After a few hours of playing the game, I’m still at the point where FEZ is a game, but all of the things that I talked about above are littered on every wall and spattered across every corner of it’s voxel-based environment.
The “shift” (pardon the pun) is apparent as soon as the aforementioned FEZ makes its appearance, but what it all means won’t become clear for most people until after many, many hours of struggling over the translation of the Hexahedron’s “moon language,” or a room that seemingly leads to no where, or why that one treasure chest seems totally inaccessible. It’s all leading to a much bigger idea: FEZ is not what you perceive it to be. Your world is not what it is perceived to be. It has dimensions, but that isn’t the true reveal. FEZ’s ultimate trickery is that what most will write off as a simple puzzle game had actually got much more going on just beneath the surface than a lot of us will ever get to see. FEZ requires an extra step of interaction on the level of a Myst or Riven, but doesn’t initially tell you as such. But you’ll quickly discover that the best kept secrets in FEZ are the ones that will require the most hard work, the most effort, and the most time, but most of all, that rotating the world is actually the simplest puzzle FEZ has to offer.
GCTV RANDOMCAST RECAP – FEZ HOUR ONE
FEZ is developed and published by Polytron Corporation
it is currently out on XBLA for 800 space bucks ($10) with the potential for it to be released on other platforms in the future
Leave a Reply