‘Fez’ Preview: A Promising Platformer

Reality-twisting platformer Fez turned a few heads when it burst onto the scene in 2008 and won the “Excellence in Visual Art” award at the Independent Games Festival. But Fez’s release was pushed back, and the once-promising indie game slipped off of the radar. I was able to play the long-awaited game at PAX East 2011, and as the 20-minute Xbox demo wrapped up, one thing was clear: Fez was worth the wait.

Villageville is the first example of Fez's gorgeous graphics and mind-bending puzzles. | Screenshot courtesy of the Polytron Corporation

Fez follows “Gomez,” an 8-bit white blob boy in the town of Villageville, a vibrant floating 2D world rendered in retro style. Despite the pixelated graphics, the environments you jump over are surprisingly detailed. Vines creep up the house walls and small mushrooms grow on moss covering the stone platforms. I climbed up the world, and met the aptly named “Geezer” who told Gomez in broken English to fulfill his destiny. There Gomez received the titular hat, and with it, the game ended.

 

Or did it? After an unexpected cutscene, the game restarted, now with an added twist. Gomez’ fez gives the player the ability to shift the world into three dimensions, either left or right. This leads to mind-bending puzzles where a chest across a huge chasm can swing right next to the player once the perspective shifts or where a set of scattered islands align to form a perfect ladder to the top of the level. Shifting the perspective also leads to hidden secrets, like doors to previously unseen rooms.

The ability to switch between 2D and 3D is not new by any means. Super Paper Mario toyed with the idea back in 2007 with mixed results, but Fez brings enough retro charm and challenge to make the gameplay fresh. From inspired dialogue to NES-style bleeps on the audio track, Fez is steeped in enough classic game nostalgia to charm even the most jaded gamer. And while the puzzles are challenging, failure is never frustrating. If the player dies (there are no enemies in Fez, so Gomez’s life is solely in the player’s hands), Gomez quickly respawns where he last stood, so misjudging a jump costs only a few seconds of trial and error.

Set to release later this year on Xbox Live Arcade, Fez looks ready to live up to the hype it created three years ago.

 

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