Fez Review

I love casually playing indie games in a windowed screen while I browse the web or procrastinate from work as much as I love putting 10 continuous hours into whatever triple-A title has just been released. A couple of the critically acclaimed indie titles passed me by for one reason or another but having played the quite frankly excellent FTL despite initially avoiding it because I thought I wouldn’t like it, I’ve put aside whatever imaginary grievances I had with each of the most popular indie titles and decided to give them all a chance. When I started playing Fez I told myself that I wasn’t going to write a review for it because it is a reasonably old game and I wanted to put my writing time into reviewing something slightly more current. Halfway through the game I continued to believe that I wouldn’t write a review for the game because I simply wanted to enjoy it without putting my critic glasses on at the end. However upon completing the game I knew that I had to write something about this game; so here we go.

I felt happier playing Fez than I have done playing any game for a very, very long time. Although it is worth noting that happy doesn’t always equal enjoyment, I did enjoy Fez an awful lot. To explain myself using other games as examples; I really enjoyed playing The Last of Us, but in 10 hours of gameplay I felt happy perhaps two or three times. Maybe my lack of happiness is due to the fact that so many blockbusting titles want to be ‘gritty’ or ‘realistic’ and are set in one war zone or another, or maybe it’s because Fez reminds me of games like Rayman 2 and therefore gives me a warm sense of contentment playing something so reminiscent of my childhood.

When it comes to casual games, moulding a world or story where the player can experience as much or as little as they want is essential in creating the best game. Indie titles such as FTL, Home and Papers, Please provide simple fun at a basic, casual level but under the surface contain a story, setting and collection of characters that are as deep as the player’s imagination. They achieve this by intentionally leaving loose ends that are unessential to the plot but give a personalised resolution to everyone who is willing to put their controller or keyboard down and think about what they’ve just experienced. Fez does this brilliantly but thrusting the player into a stunning world and letting them explore it at their own pace and in their own order. The main story is resolved at the end, but there aren’t answers for everything in the game, whether that is the reasoning behind giant Owl statues, the wall paintings depicting an alien race or the spirits that only appear at certain times of the day. It’s a special kind of game where a large part of the fun lies in not even playing the game, just piecing together the deliciously abstract snippets of back story, despite the fact that the actual game itself is still fantastic even when played with your brain in neutral.

The basis of the game is to not invent something new, but to re-invent a staple of the games industry by adding a new dimension to the basic platformer… adding three dimensions in fact, as the 2D world can be rotated around a vertical axis. Sounds complicated? The basic function isn’t, but you can bet that the developers have designed the game to demand that you master the concept in order to experience every facet of the world.

As a protagonist, Gomez is adorable, loveable and emotionally investable; quite something given that he is essentially just a white marshmallow-man wearing a hat. We experience the world in tandem with him and therefore his adventure is our own. The closing scene next to the credits shows Gomez playing the same drum-kit seen in his room, something which is both whimsical and slightly upsetting as you know your adventure is at an end; even more so considering Phil Fish, the creator of Fez cancelled the sequel in a spectacularly public fashion. Needless to say, given that I’ve spent the entire article harping on about how the Fez-experience doesn’t end with the game, I felt the need to write about it because it is so darn great that the three or four hours it took for me to complete the game just didn’t satisfy my hunger. My one qualm would have been that the length of the game didn’t justify a full price tag, but as an older indie title, Fez is definitely worth picking up for a few pounds.

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On an unrelated point, having started a new 11-hour-a-day, 6-day-a-week job, both gaming time and review-writing time have been cut to a minimum. I enjoy doing both and will attempt to stick to my one-per-week schedule, but as the month break between this and my last article proves; it just isn’t always possible.

Simon Jenkins