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

Fez, by Polytron
Screenshot taken from playXBLA.
  • SirNiko

    Why don’t you just rent one?

  • Jake Dlugolecki

     “As far as “indie” goes, the site covers games by very small independent studios”

    And yet there have been Minecraft-related posts as recently as the end of last year. Notch is a multimillionaire and Mojang has a lot of employees now. I don’t think they qualify anymore.

  • Jake Dlugolecki

     I don’t doubt any of this, Phil, but there’s something you’re not telling us. I’ve played a huge number of XBLA games, and until now the only ones I’ve seen Microsoft’s logo in were the ones actually published by Microsoft. Either they’ve just started putting their logo into all new XBLA releases, or they had some added involvement with Fez.

  • http://www.derekyu.com Derek Yu

    The amount of money Notch has is a non-issue for me, but 28 employees does push the upper limit of what I’d consider posting on TIGSource. It’s still a far cry from Nintendo, Valve, or even Double Fine, though.

    One game that I posted recently that I would not consider to be indie is Bastion. Even though they are a small studio, I did not realize at the time that the game was published by Warner Bros.

  • SirNiko

    Minecraft might be a special exception, given that Minecraft originated in the TIGforums and some of the TIGs regulars have a special connection to the game.

    That said, I also don’t have a problem if Derek happens to post something that isn’t an indie title just because it’s a game he played and enjoyed. Part of supporting independent game developers is to talk about good games so that we can learn from them.

  • Guest

    Vile and vicious? His complaints sounded reasonable enough to me, maybe  a checkpoint system like they did it on VVVVVV would have been a better idea. And that game had instakill hazards and enemies you couldn’t jump on, in fact so did Manic Miner and many others that predated Mario. 
    In fact why did they even add in fall damage deaths if you’re just going to teleport back up again, sounds more like compensating for the fact that sometimes when you’re on solid ground and you rotate the camera you find out you’re actually floating in mid air and now falling to your doom.
    Also the lack of enemies and emphasis on item fetching and exploration is not as much of a bold move as you think, Knytt and its many derivatives have done it before.

    You don’t need to be able to create a product in order to criticize something, people here have been playing games for more than 20 years now, we certainly can tell when something doesn’t work.

  • Guest

    This is fully commercial product being sponsored by Microsoft Game Studios on the frontpage of the Xbox Marketplace.
    People are entitled to be as aggressive and vile as they want with their criticism, specially if they were charged money for it.
    Stop treating indie devs as if they were bullied little kids, it is a competitive industry out there after all and if the creator can’t take criticism maybe it’s him who shouldn’t be “bearing the burden” of creating a product in the first place.

  • Guest

    Hey Phil, your game just sucks.
    I mean, I won an award back in 2008 for a single level demo with one working object on it  that proves it. Choke on my dick.

  • http://profiles.google.com/fucrate Michael Boxleiter

    god damn, “with a twist!” fucking brilliant, twist indeed!  thats good, they should put it on the metaphorical box

  • Anonymous

    Because 98% of rental places haven’t rented consoles since the N64 was popular.

  • Anonymous

    And God knows nobody is ever allowed to use a gimmick more than once.

  • Phil is a God

    Non-Xbox users can try out the free PC demo here
    http://armorgames.com/play/10899/sky-island
    Unfortunately this port took less than half a decade to make, but on the plus side it has extra features such as enemies, scoring and challenge.

    Also you can find out what a wonderful friendly person the creator is at his tweeter:
    http://twitter.com/#!/phil_fish

  • fecal_brunch

    Yes, I questioned why I got that in a humble bundle. Not that it wasn’t amazing.

  • http://www.facebook.com/micheallen Micheal-Allen Kingsley Ackerma

    Is there a reason the game has to have enemies?  How does that add anymore challenge than what it already is?  What does the score actually do really?  If you are doing well you should be able to tell.  As for the challenge.  It has plenty of it.  It’s like being pissed off that tetris doesn’t have enemies or boss battles.  Give me a break.
    “Also hating on the game because you hate the person who made it is the same thing as hating someones cooking because they parallel park badly.” ( quote stolen from Tim rogers)

  • http://www.facebook.com/micheallen Micheal-Allen Kingsley Ackerma

    (My bad about the vile and vicious thing. It was early and I just spent 9+ hours playing FEZ so I was a bit tired and loopy.)
    As I’ve just stated because I have actually played the game and I actually have an open mind to try it for more than 5 minutes.  You do not respawn in the middle of a jumping challenge.  There are safe points that are granted the respawn point.  Would you prefer lives and dying and going back to the title screen and then restarting?  Really breaks the flow of the game.  Games that use lives and boot you back to a load screen, title scree, black screen whatever.  They break the flow.  Believe me if this game had lives you would be bitching about how archaic it is in design.  The reason you can respawn so leisurely is because the game wants you to play it and relax and have a peaceful time.  That seems to be the intent and if it’s not coming across well at least it tried something different.  Instead of throwing countless enemies, objects, bosses, obstacles, and numbers etc at you.  

    It’s a different game yes.  If you don’t like it fine.  Don’t play it.  But don’t come here and try to get other people not to experience it because you hate the developer.  Believe it or not but this game may not be targeted at you.  This is a pretty cool game for a younger audience as well as adults who don’t want to get so invested into reflex based mechanics. Confession time.  Before buying FEZ I dropped by /v/ and joined a 400+ reply discussion about FEZ.  Many people were hating on it complaining it lacks challenge, grace, magic, hardcore gameyness and whatever they could come up with to insult it.  I read all 400+ replies and by the end of it I told myself “That’s a bummer guess I won’t buy it”  Later that night I decided that I would try it out for myself regardless of what others were saying.  In the end I’m glad I bought it and I thank the developers for creating it.  It was a unique experience with a lot of hard work put into it.  Just because the game took many years to get finished isn’t some sort of free pass to bitch about it.Also I shouldn’t have made that crack about having to create something.  It didn’t add to the discussion.I guess what I was trying to say is if you have gone through the grueling work of making games, art, comics, movies etc you’ll be able to tell how much effort was put in.  

    I’m not sure I’m getting my point across and for that I blame myself and my poor communication skills.  Sorry.

  • Guest

    Sorry for being off-topic and kind of trollish, but Tetris really did get better with boss battles
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnRavyRBX0U

  • Guest

    So, people posted over 400 reasons why they hated the game but you’ll
    still rationalize it as everybody just picking on poor Phil, because he
    took 5 goddamn years to come up with a high requirements engine to render bloated
    16×16 tiles, oh I’m sorry, TRIXELS, using 250,000+ polygons per
    screen and dynamic lighting all just for some cool shading effect?

    Couldn’t he just use bump mapping?

    Hell I’ve seen Minecraft mods that looked better than this and
    people still called it by its actual name. We have far superior pixel artists than this all over the web too.

    Then after people pointed out how unoriginal the changing perspective
    trick was and how it had been around since at least the gamecube days, you
    say that is ok
    to imitate a concept. But then why did Phil throw a fit once a small flash programmer did in 2 months what he couldn’t do in 5 years

    with the release of Sky Island?

    And what about Yume Nikki, Knytt and Within a Deep Forest and so many
    others doing the no-combat fetch quest thing way long ago, but you call
    it a bold
    move when Phil does it?

    Or having a horrible map without any sense of direction somehow counts as good challenge?

    Do you understand there’s absolutely nothing special about FEZ at all,
    and even though this is his first project Phil still acts as if he’s the
    ultimate game designer? That it’s actually been proven that his game
    could’ve been done as a flash application, but he’s still still
    constantly making an ass out of himself?

    People love to hate FEZ because of how delusioned and overhyped it is.

    If you’re going to call all Japanese games shit, even if you do
    apologize for it later, then you better back that up with some rather
    impressive stuff.
     
    It’s just incredibly ironic the way that Phil
    copied Pixel’s art style so well, but he couldn’t emulate his humility.
    And he really should delete his tweeter, if you read his messages most
    of the flaming was done by himself at his followers. The man simply
    can’t handle  trolls.

    Way to act professional.

  • Guest

    What’s with all the Vitriol?  This site seems to be 4chan for game developers. 

    Jealous, snipey, self-entitled and be-monicled prats.Don’t like the game?  Don’t buy it.Don’t like the editorial license editors wield when selecting stories?  Skip over it.God I hope none of my games ever get featured here.

  • Anonymous

     Of Course, why buy a crappy game!
    a crappy game that is based from another crappy Japanese game.
    and I hope I will never buy one from you too which you probably rip from somewhere

  • guest

    you guys are a bunch of monsters

  • Erik

    What are you, six years old?

  • Erik

    Criticism is one thing, telling people to choke on their reproductive organs for releasing a game they don’t like is another. Just goes to prove that 90% of people on the internet are complete idiots.

  • http://www.facebook.com/micheallen Micheal-Allen Kingsley Ackerma

    I couldn’t give less of a fuck about Phil Fish when it comes to FEZ.  I don’t need to know about the developer in order to enjoy his game.  And please stop putting words in my mouth.  While I have never played Eternal daughter or Knytt stories I did not say that they “weren’t” bold.

    Also in the world of corporate bullshit and PR as well as political correctness I am glad someone is as abrasive as Phil.  He honestly states his opinions and doesn’t back down.  And even if he did back down people would just call him a pussy.  So yeah I hope he continues to piss off many more people.

    And just a thought.  Even though Phil makes a blanket statement like “japanese games suck(which right now they really do and not so much the games but the method of production) people attack him.  He is only one person.  How would you feel if you made a statement people didn’t agree with and everyday people insulted you and tried to get you angry?

    Anyway screw you.  Even if Phil is in the wrong it doesn’t give people the right to try and ruin his life.

    Have a good day.

  • Jamagic

    Fez is a paper mario ripoff! :D

  • Jamagic

    A game with no enemies is like playing tennis with no opponent against a wall…which is what people with no friends do, which is sad.

  • http://twitter.com/Daftmouse Mikel Kjell

     Says he has nothing against someone…..before launching into how much he dislikes them.

  • Jamagic

    I see, pretty genius! Clearly most six years old claim to have gained awards in 2008, that’s why you went for the “attack his age” strategy.. I honestly wouldn’t have thought of that, but you surely think outside the box! ..WHAT AN IDIOT, you could have told him anything about how stupid he sounded, and his lack of brains, but no! you went for something even stupider, making him look like the smart guy here! nice going… >:(

  • Jamagic

    You know it’s getting pretty tight around here…. :-0

  • Jamagic

    I love this game, best Microsoft game in ages! Although I enjoy indie games better.

  • PhilFishFan123129312391238

    well said god sir!!!

    no offnese butt imo the haters of this gmae r all halo fans who r just jelousous of pill phish cuz he’s is more popular then them

  • Guest

    I would say a studio is indie if it is free to develop a game however it
    wants, under it’s own rules, not following the rules of some outside
    party, which to be abstract, would also include society as an outside
    party. A developer not scared to take “risks”, because they are a non-issue. Even if they have millions of dollars, they don’t spend nearly so much developing and releasing a game, even if it is on Steam or XBLA.

  • Cypress_dahlia

     Dude did you just say Japanese games suck? I mean, I understand if you say “most Japanese games suck”–because most games in general do, in fact, suck. But you do realize some of the most highly lauded franchises in America–actually, most of them–come from Japan, right?

    Until Phil Fish or anyone on the planet makes anything remotely as good as Shadow of the Colossus they can shut up about that. Seriously. Fez isn’t as revolutionary as he seems to think it is.

  • jmickle

    I asked fish about this (in person!) and he said they just aren’t considering anything properly until after it is released, because there was too much to do in the meantime without worrying about porting it as well.

  • Guest

    But Eternal Daughter did have lots of enemies. And pretty aggressive ones at that, that game is brutal.

    So basically, you’re happy that Phil is an asshole about his opinions but screw those who call him out on being the talentless hack he is. Yeah you sure taught those politically correct pussies how to never criticize anyone ever again.

    As for what I’d personally do if I were Phil, I’d STOP FEEDING THE TROLLS and let it go, but apparently his ego just won’t let him do that…

  • Guest

    Echochrome is Japanese and handled the perspective changing thing way better.
    Unfortunately it didn’t receive any awards before being released.

  • Ugh

    Lot of petty, stupid, assumptive people in here. Best game I’ve played in years.

  • http://twitter.com/HeroOfTheFSA Joseph Gibson

    hi folks. super joe, the hero of the fsa here. just wanted to say congratulations to phil fish and team on the release of their long awaited game. go get em, tiger.

  • http://twitter.com/phubans Paul Hubans

    I can see both sides of the argument, but it’s unrealistic to say that people can’t be critical as a consumer. Do you really expect people to offer not but praise on this or any game? Sure, the designer rustled a few jimmies, but even I was once under the impression that he was an asshole, I was still intending on buying his game. I’m still looking forward to it, and yes, it is very hyped. But so was Skyrim and I bought that. Was it a good game? Sure. Was it as amazing as it was hyped up to be? Not a chance; I didn’t even finish it. I’m going to withhold my feedback for Fez until AFTER I play it, which is only the right thing to do. Just keep in mind that the people white-knighting for something look as bad as those against it; same emotionally-driven sense of self-righteousness; it’s sickening.

  • http://twitter.com/phubans Paul Hubans

    Honestly, I think the enemies VS no enemies thing is a very trite argument, and people will prefer one over the other based on what kind of games they’re into. Would you say Shadow of the Colossus sucked because it didn’t really feature any enemies apart from the bosses, which weren’t really enemies but puzzles? I personally didn’t like that game; it felt sparse, bland, and uninspiring. Others will swear by it. Tetris on the other hand; I watched the aforeposted video and saw that having enemies/bosses added nothing to the game. It depends on the game, what the developer is trying to evoke, and in the case of Fez, I never got the impression that the emphasis was on making it an action-packed Cave Story clone, but the real draw to this game (at least for me) is seeing charming retro graphics re-invented in a whole new way. I love the game’s aesthetic, but the true test will be when I play the game. Can’t wait. 

  • Likers Gonna Like

    so basically phil fish can be as abrasive as he wants but other people aren’t allowed to be abrasive towards him? thanks i’ll keep that in mind.

  • http://twitter.com/phubans Paul Hubans

    Can’t wait = I can’t wait touch what I’ve been waiting 5 years for. I can’t wait to see if it lives up to this hype. I can’t wait to scrutinize it, be critical, and use my own prowess as a game designer to take it apart and find it’s real flaws; not nit-pick things that are non-issues. I also hope that it’s something that I will enjoy, and perhaps even gain a greater respect of Phil Fish by playing.

    My online reputation isn’t quite the best, either, but I take game development and design very seriously, and I wouldn’t want my work to be overlooked just because it’s easy to be an asshole when you’re sitting behind a keyboard.

  • Phil

    I disagree with your opinions on Tetris Blast, did your game win an award 4 years before you had even finished it yet? Did you?
    Well, suck my dick. Choke on it.

    Seriously though, your advice should have been better given to Phil himself. He grew into infamy thanks to his juvenile online behavior. Everyone was nothing but respectful to him at GDC 2011 and then he makes an ass of himself, and the trolls simply got away with  a few laughs out of it all. Successful troll is successful.

  • Phil is a God

    I’ll ignore all of the legitimately listed problems with this game and go with your personal opinion, thank you. Best game in years since the Commodore 64.

  • Guest

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfICeBtVv8U
    The game above came out in 2007, ironically at around the same time when FEZ started development, unfortunately it is Japanese and can’t possibly be any good.
    I mean the graphics don’t even look like they belong in 1986 wtf, are you even trying Japan?

    The video below however, is perfection in digital form and its creator is the second coming of our messiah Jhon Romero.  Suck it down.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgeEj7r6BfU

    Any criticizing is invalid, unless you won an award before even fishing anything or something. Choke on my dick.
    They also artificially lengthened the game by adding a new game+ with an  extra perspective, but that’s not dull work, folks. It’s art. You see they are anti-cubes, because they are hidden in your first play through. This game is so great you’ll want to play it twice anyway.

  • Anonymous

    One more thing, isn’t most ambience music made by a random generators or something?
    Not that I’m attacking the musician, as I feel he has no fault in getting involved with this trainwreck. But really what’s so immersive about random notes and lots of reverb.

    Also screw that guy who dissed Tetris Blast. That one gimmick completely changed the whole gampe flow, you can’t blow up whole squares of blocks in Tetris, nor can you cause chain explosions. Also the enemies have their own patterns and attacks to use and the difficulty scales accordingly, unlike tetris that’s just play until the game crashes or you die.

    Saying that Bombliss added nothing new is like saying Ultima and Elder Scrolls are the same because crap they both have rpg elements, or that Columns and Bejeweled are the same because you match stones identical color.

  • MonkeyMaw

    His comments on Twitter after the winning his award removed all interest I had in his game and him as a developer. Call it what you will, but my money would be better in the hands of developers whom I respect. On that note, it doesn’t take much at all to gain respect. Anyhow, good to see the game out, but the next game I’ll be buying is Spelunky :)

  • Jamagic

    I agree, it’s been a long time Microsoft made such a great game!

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jonathan-Blow/766494542 Jonathan Blow

    tigsource discussion seems to be kind of embarrassing these days.

    If some of these commenters would put as much effort into game development as they do into being jealous and/or pointlessly negative, the indie community would be bringing a lot of really great games into the world…

  • Likers Gonna Like

    yes yes the haters are all just jealous that must be the reason

  • Poopenmeyer

    tl;dr :

    phil fish=asshole
    fez=awesome