Fez

[fuchikoma]

So um... It's here. At long last, it's available on XBL.
Impressions? Obviously it has an interesting visual style - it really does feel 2D between rotations. The platforming reminds me a little bit of EchoChrome with the "subjective reality" thing. It also carries on the tradition of bizarre dialog from NPCs. I haven't seen anything ridiculously groundbreaking yet, but it is fairly entertaining.

Edited September 9, 2013 by Deanb

[TheFlyingGerbil]

So it's not the triumph of the West over Japan, that Mr. Fish would have us believe then?

[fuchikoma]

I could just be jaded... I haven't seen anything that makes me go "wooooow!" yet though, and now I've collected enough cubes to open all the doors (the main goal) but haven't been everywhere yet. It IS still pretty original - the only other game to use these... physics(?) that I know is Echochrome: Basically you look at things from a straight 2D 90 degree angle, and if one platform is closer to the screen, but another is farther back, as long as they appear to be side by side, you can hop from one to the other. They use this trick in some clever ways when you have to traverse areas.

 

Also, the sprite art and animation is top notch. Your movements look really smooth, and there are little incidental creatures added for decoration that move in simple, but cool ways. Wherever you go, there's a cycle of day and night that tends to look pretty nice - the color of the sky changes as the light level shifts.

 

It's glitchy on purpose and not - I won't spoil anything, but it has some cool glitch effects at times. Also, another time, a wooden door opened halfway (the top half...) and I tried to go through it. The game froze and dumped me to NXE.

 

It's a little rough - if you run indoors, then go into a corner and rotate the room, it's very easy to slip through the wall and jump into the miasma - you "die" and come back right away, since death has no penalty in Fez. Also, going with the "what you see is real" thing, it's often easy to fall to your death if you rotate so that you're behind something, then you move a little bit. In general, it's pretty easy to fall to your death in this game, but also inconsequential.

 

It's still a pretty solid game, just not mindblowing.

Edited April 14, 2012 by fuchikoma

[Waldorf and Statler]

I tried playing it. I'm too story driven and that what was obviously the last thing on his mind.

[fuchikoma]

I can see that. I'm still having fun with it, but the story is "find all the things."

Fun little thing for people to try: Hit "pause" a bunch. Nothing special - just the effect he used can end up with multiple images of the play screen laid out in strange patterns.

 

I wasn't as far as I thought before - the platforming does get kind of serious later on, though most of the difficulty still seems to come from having a LOT of momentum when you jump. It's very easy to fly past the target platform...

 

Also, while this game totally does an EchoChrome-like thing with perspective, Fez does a lot more with it - assuming EchoChrome doesn't go all-out for the last levels...

[SomTervo]

While the story is pretty basic, I was still surprised by how solid what he's written actually is. There are some great themes of time/space and computing in there within what appears to be a very organically-stylized game. Pretty legit theories about spate/time being merged into a crazy platformer thing.

 

I'm really enjoying it, though it does feel like something's missing. I'd have liked some form of combat at least (unless that comes in later in the game).

 

The main thing I'm enjoying is the game world, it's emergently large once you look at the world map, and pretty fun to explore/ solve. After thinking about it, the real thing I'm actually enjoying the most is the music. It's fucking excellent. http://disasterpeace.com. Some really really awesome stuff, think I'll actually buy it.

Edited April 17, 2012 by kenshi_ryden

[fuchikoma]

I think he did a really good job of conveying the idea of a character understanding an additional dimension while everyone else goes on unaware of it. Much more intellectually accessible than

(or so I'd assume - Miegakure, like Fez, was announced ages ago - there's still no demo.)

 

The music in Fez... I figured it would be well received, but to be honest, I don't notice it most of the time - just when it starts to grate on my nerves, which is surprisingly often; especially when you get into things like the glitchy screechy nighttime themes.

 

 

I haven't seen any combat 24 + -4 cubes in, but the platforming definitely gets more agressive and you are expected to be more adept at perspective manipulation.

I'm having fun with that. There are just too many rooms where no matter what I do, I can't even imagine what it takes to uncover all the paths from it/hidden features. I've given up on several, expecting maybe I'll get to jump twice as high later or some new gameplay mechanic might manifest because some of them seem physically impossible. Seems to be a common complaint about this from what I've seen - head-scratching on the level of old adventure games where you kind of had to be the author to figure it out.

[SomTervo]

That's nice at least. Some old school difficulty is good. Reminds me a little of Super Meat Boy in that way- but rather than a basic test of sheer skill, this is a basic test of sheer brainpower.

 

Re: music: I hope I don't start to get annoyed with it. I'm a real fan of ambient and chillwavey shoegazey stuff, so I really like Fez' music, which is basically that genre but chiptune, as well (which I love). I haven't heard anything too grating yet, and I love how it mixes with the environments.

Edited April 18, 2012 by kenshi_ryden

[fuchikoma]

I think the music usually fits well, but when it comes to ambient type stuff, I'd go about as far as DJ Krush or Prefuse 73, but not quite to Boards of Canada, so I guess it's a matter of taste. It is clever the way it muffles when you're behind the scenery though and that may not seem as natural with other styles of music.

[fuchikoma]

Ok, so the spatial puzzles are fun, but late in the game when it gets into codebreaking, it's about as enjoyable as writing an accounting exam for a course you never took in the first place. I understand now why I've seen so much criticism that if you're not Phil Fish, you simply won't solve some puzzles. I was actually holding back from saying this until I found one that assumes you will have certain third party hardware and software capabilities completely separate from the XBox 360 - if you don't, you're out of luck; you're simply not getting all the cube bits.

 

Also, it gets really choppy in some of the later levels, but then, it also crashes a fair bit, so maybe it's just choppy when it's on the edge of crashing.

[SomTervo]

Codebreaking? I heard some of it's pretty intense, but does this mean it isn't solvable by just platforming and world rotation? That would be disappointing.

[fuchikoma]

No. I won't post any solutions, but I'll err on the side of caution and hide this:

 

There are rooms where you only get the secret from it if you can decypher a string of button presses.

Some of these rooms just assume you'll take the decyphered message from one room and the message from another room, then mix them together in certain arbitrary ways before applying them while standing in an arbitrary spot. Also, you're gonna need a modern smartphone that can read a low-contrast QRCode.

 

 

There are actually multiple systems of glyph puzzles, and some include writing words and numbers.

 

 

Edited April 21, 2012 by fuchikoma

[SomTervo]

I noticed QRCode stuff. I think my phone has that, not positive. So are you basically saying all those tons of random pages on walls with odd symbols on are actually codes which have to be applied in certain ways? Nutzoids.

[fuchikoma]

I don't know if all of them are... but some definitely are. I normally like to finish a game with only the resources in the game as my guide, but I was talking abut Fez with a friend the other night and how it was slowing down a lot at the end with all the unopenable secret rooms and he mentioned this. IMO, you would not be amiss to find a glyph guide for the game - though it's theoretically possible to derive the readings of everything - personally I'd have more fun spending a day in MS Excel making spreadsheets.

[SomTervo]

Sounds like he placed the game's design a little too far on the wrong side of the 'confusing versus mysterious and satisfying' line. But just, thus far it's been pretty fun.

[fuchikoma]

I'd still recommend it after a patch or two come out. Maybe he wasn't designing the difficulty for "a player" but for "the playerbase" (ie. he didn't want something "the Internet" would figure out too quickly.)

[SomTervo]

Yeah it's kinda nice that it's requiring community work of some kind to even solve some of the puzzles. In a way that's refreshing. Reminds me of Demon's/Dark Souls with it's community puzzle solving and work.

 

I'll keep playing through it while I have the time and pay a bit more attention to background images and patterns. I've been looking forward to it for years and have it, but don't have time to play it much right now.

[Cyber Rat]

Even if this were available for PC (I assume it will be at some point, as a good deal of XBLA Indie games are), I'd skip it. I generally believe in death of the author, but I want to give Fish money as much as I want to give it to CliffyB.

[SomTervo]

I agree with death of the author to an extent- but what I don't agree with is death of the industry.

 

Whenever I buy a game, the largest proportion of my 'why to buy' justification is actually whether I want to support the game, by itself, in the eyes of the industry. In order to make such games look more profitable to the business of games; thus propagating the likelihood of more games like it being developed.

 

= why I bought things like Alan Wake, Ico/SotC, Fez, I Am Alive, etc. So that when a proposal like these is brought to a studio, they think 'hey, we've made things like this before that sold well, we'll greenlight it'. So more good, and unique games!

[excel_excel]

I know he said something stupid, but he's not that bad is he?

Fez looks so interesting though, the way the platforming isn't even the focus of the game after a while is quite unique....may have to give it a whirl, on the Bombcast they were all singing its praises.

[SomTervo]

He doesn't seem very bad at all in comparison with a lot of creative directors. Even Jon Blow is at least twice the prickage.

 

I can't say whether it's worth it yet, but the game's pretty damn unique. It has a lot of minor glitches which were really unexpected (lots as in, literally most times you go through a doorway and it loads another part of the level) but the level design is great and the later puzzles (which I am not at yet) are apparently a real challenge. Some of the ones I've done currently are pretty tough. The platforming is very satisfying.

[deanb]

 

Fez now seems, for the moment at least, safe. Officially signed with Microsoft for an exclusive XBLA release, eschewing the often more lucrative avenue of Steam on PC, Fish remains adamant about Polytron’s decision for the game’s fixed destination.

 

“Fez is a console game, not a PC game,” he states, emphatically. “It’s made to be played with a controller, on a couch, on a Saturday morning. To me, that matters; that’s part of the medium.” I get so many comments shouting at me that I’m an idiot for not making a PC version. ‘You’d make so much more money! Can’t you see? Meatboy sold more on Steam!’ Good for them. But this matters more to me than sales or revenue. It’s a console game on a console. End of story.”

 

 

@PHIL_FISH

@Darkflight BOO HOO. PCs are for spreadsheets.

 

http://store.steampowered.com/app/224760/

 

It seems porting to PC is cheaper than patching the game 100K+ people paid for on Xbox.

 

And the quoted interview, and Tweet. 

 

 

Dean isn't buying Fez.

 

[TheMightyEthan]

Wow, what an asshole.

[Eleven]

I just read about that ridiculous puzzle, since it was linked in an article about this game and Steam.

 

I can't believe there is such a thing as an unsolvable puzzle in a video game. Wow.

 

Though it actually made me not want to play it. I hate puzzles.

 

Still, that was cool.

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

Just like I don't care what religion or political beliefs my favorite musicians have I don't give a shit about Phil Fish being an asshole.

 

The game is supposed to be good and it's not doing anything that's harming the industry so I have no issues.