Fez

By: Derek Yu

On: April 13th, 2012

After nearly five years of development, Polytron’s Fez has been released on Xbox Live Arcade for 800 MSP. The winner of this year’s IGF Grand Prize Award, Fez is a non-linear puzzle platformer where you can rotate the camera to reveal the world’s third dimension. The game features a soundtrack by Rich “Disasterpeace” Vreeland, which will be released on April 20th but is available for pre-order.

TIGdb: Entry for Fez

Screenshot taken from playXBLA.

Posted in Platformers, Puzzle, Xbox 360 | Tags: Polytron

Guest

Whatever your opinion on FEZ is, the I just won an award suck on my dick comment is going to live down in infamy, no matter how many games Phil makes people will always bring it up.

No matter the quality of the games themselves. Choke on it.
http://twitter.com/hauntedculture december

Now that this is finished is Annabelle Kennedy going to return to Tiny Survival Horror? That’s my main concern up in here.
Jamagic

Fez is full of bugs, guys. This guy signed a 25 million dollar contract with M$ and now looks like he wanted to pull the good’ol’notch’a’doo, huh? realeasing alphas and shit like a rookie. Looks like japanese games are not the only thing that sucks, amirite?
Jamagic

Oh, hey guys. I just found out the real truth. This game was released long before FEZ existed:
http://armorgames.com/play/10899/sky-island FEZ is a ripoff!! OMG!!
Someone

I’m still laughing hard and loud about the avalanche of epic replies. Many thanks to all.
Cypress_dahlia

TBH, despite the fact that Fish is a dick, I don’t think Fez is a shitty game. An undeniable amount of work went into it. But it’s not revolutionary, so — as many other things that are not revolutionary must — it really has to try hard to stand out amongst its peers.

It basically has to be the Cave Story of perspective puzzle games. Cave Story did nothing particularly new, but it did what it did extremely well. That’s why it’s so famous, not because it was in, any way, revolutionary. Maybe if this game was released 5 years ago it would have had a better shot at being super innovative. But now it seems like Fez is stuck making a name for itself the hard way: by simply being a great, not so different, game. It can no longer market itself on the assumption that it is the only game of its kind.

I’d say it’s performing about average right now.
Rubereaglenest

The soundtrack by Disasterpiece is amazing beautiful.
Jamagic

I don’t think anyone truly thinks FEZ is a shitty game. If they say so they might be trolling.
What many people might truly feel is that FEZ is an ‘ok’ game. Because if they’re like me, they’re objective when analyzing a game.
There’s plenty of great games that I believe are better than FEZ, but they’re done by big teams with big budgets, and FEZ isn’t.
The thing is, personally, if I’m buying a game with my hard earned cash, I don’t care a lot about who did it, how long it took, and what was his budget; I care about the quality. And FEZ is just another game to me. Otherwise, with the fact FEZ is indie, I can say it’s a great accomplished, not better than minecraft, but a very respectable accomplishment, more than I’ll ever accomplish in my gamedev career (especially because it’s not my full time job). Does his accomplishment entitle the author to be a complete ass? I don’t think so. This fellow must think he’s a rockstar for making this game successfully. But an idiot is still an idiot, even with the coding skills and a lot of patience for having completed a full game. I guess some people just don’t know how to handle a lot of attention.

Oh and FEZ is full of bugs, what’s up with that?
Anonymous

Fez isn’t worth ten bucks.
The gimmick is kind of neat, and the environment is interesting enough, but it’s almost completely devoid of any sort of enjoyable gameplay.
Though it has no personal enjoyability, it might be worth supporting the developer for – however, Phil Fish, isn’t worth supporting because he’s an arrogant wanker, so save your money and go buy a beer or two instead.
Bob

Sorry, but after I got a chance to play this, this really wasn’t worth the hype IMO.

The gameplay was very shallow and the praised music, while nice, isn’t really music as much as it is ambiance. It’s too arty and not enough substance.
Jamagic

THANKS! that pretty much sums up what many of us were trying to EXPLAIN to the others.
I mean, it’s not like FEZ is bad. But it wasn’t worth the hype, as you put it. Most of the hype probably came from publicity and the fact it took so long to get released TONS people were waiting for it.
I bet if someone didn’t hear about fez until now, they’d just say it’s a cute “oldschool” game. And I bet if it wasn’t bought by microsoft, ratings on commercial game review sites would a lot lower. Most review sites gave it 8 out of 10, I think it’s closer to a 7. But it’s merely mario with a twist. Think paper mario, and paper mario gets 9+ score on most review sites, you do the math.
Blogblog

Trolls are never successful.
Refluxive

It’s about…friggin’…bloody…time.
Derp

I have something against Fish. Because he’s a loudmouth asshole who brags about having done a 5/10 points game.
http://twitter.com/phyernet Mike Poole

REally nice game and awesome concept! The platforming aspects couldve used a bit more tweaking. nd I really wish there was considerations towards “other” forms of challenges. Then just puzzles & jumping. Other challenges, like enemies and maybe a few bosses.
Anonymous

Who pays you does not determine whether you’re indie or not. This game was made by 1 person, with a partner who ditched him and then a new partner later on. The toil and crap Phil Fish has gone through to make this lovechild of his is about as indie as it gets.

Go watch Indie Game: The Movie. It covers this game in part of it, answering some of your questions. Fez is indie. Period.
BananaGuy

You go girl! I like your points! There are great games from japan, like shadow of the colossus! That fish guy sure proves the point about being better to keep your mouth shut and make people wonder if you’re stupid, than actually talking and having everyone confirm it! He should have kept his big mouth shut, now everyone know’s he’s an idiot. Anyway, shadow of the colossus….that’s a great example and personally I love most japanese games even if that’s subjective. And I also love many games from other places, like skyrim or crysis, but there’s plenty of really bad games from there as well, should I condemn the rest of the local market becasue of that? No, because I’m not dumb like fishy fish.
BananaGuy

Yeah, best games in the market have enemies, for example shadow of the colossus had those giant colossal creatures, mario bros had all kind of enemies… but this game was lazy in that department.
SteveJohnson

I bought this game… it was fun for about 3 or 4 minutes then I got bored… I haven’t played in over a week… pretty boring stuff tbh
Mrhill

Hahaha
Nobuyuki

If I didn’t know this was FEZ I’d think it’s one of those free games laying around the internets, the only thing interesting is that it’s similar to paper mario.
smashp

lol seriously? you can buy the exact amount of points to get this game, and are you seriously crying about setting up an acct? http://www.xboxlive.com, if you cant do that well then i feel sorry for you.
Podunkian

Hey, I’m getting squeezed!
Clubsoft

Help me!!!
Duncan

Can’t breathe…
Adam

Tell me about it…
Sammy

Word says Phil Fish is still in debt with Microsoft. And they can’t even pay for re-licensing any game fixes. Man that sucks, hope he doesn’t choke on it.
Fuckknuckle

I’m sure they won’t.