I was going to write a review of Fez. You know, traditional review structure, explain the story, go over the gameplay mechanics, describe the graphics… But in the end, I decided that would be a waste of everyone’s time. Instead, I am going to gush about the place the game is set, and how it is the most complete imaginary world I have ever encountered. even though I know next to nothing about it for sure. The evolution of it’s inhabitants should be first port of call.
This actually blew my mind when I realised it: Gomez’s ancestors, the ones with the tall heads and only one eye – their village was in two dimensions and their rooms couldn’t be rotated. Did they live in two dimensions simply because they only had one eye? If perception is the key to understanding the world, then maybe. It’s like trying to explain the colour red to someone who cannot see! I digress. They eventually evolved into more Gomez-looking creatures but with large, square heads, and most importantly: two eyes. When you go to their village and it is inhabited, it is clearly in three dimensions, with no rooms being neglected like in the tall-head village, or in Gomez’s home village. Now, this is the bit that felt like a penny dropping into place: The space-squids have three eyes, and can travel through folds in space, quite possibly known as the fourth dimension.
A correlation between number of eyes and number of dimensions perceived.
Why did Gomez and his fellow villagers not see in three dimensions? Look at the size of their heads. They are clearly not large enough. Even the mega hexahedron commented on this at the start of the game. Gomez’s head was too small to understand three dimensions, and it broke the mega hexahedron. Is it sad that I translated anything and everything from Fezzish to English? Or just devoted? Oh, and I cannot understate how creepy the Owls were in this game – from statues of owls that follow you around no matter how many times you rotate, to their cryptic messages – every time I saw one fly in I squealed like a little girl. Were they related to (or in cahoots with) the space-squids? I don’t have any of the answers, just speculation.
I think Gomez was going back in time throughout his adventure. Or at least wibble-wobbling through time, going back and forth as he travelled from area to area. This is cemented, to me at least, “when” you visit the square-head village. Or rather, not the point in time “when” you visit it, but the points in time “when” it exists. At one end of the physical map it is vibrant and buzzing, full of villagers and workmen. At the other end it is neglected and in a state of disrepair. The further you go on your adventure, the more black cubes of space/time appear, cluttering your path. These could be remnants of the catastrophe, and clear up as time flows backwards. When you get to the end of your adventure, the end of the game, you go through the portal and may well end up causing the space/time catastrophe that wrecked the square-heads village. Neat touch: The warp doors have pixelated infinity symbols on them, symbols which visually represent something wrapping back upon itself. The doors open in one place and provide you with near-instant travel to a far away location. Essentially folding space back upon itself. Just like the infinity symbol.
That the square-heads have their own language, both spoken and written, is a testament to the imagination of the developer. That Gomez and his town-folk cannot understand it is a neat touch which allies our plucky protagonist and his chums with you, the player. To work it all out, the game had me scrawling notes on bits of paper, using cyphers to translate tetronimos into button pushes, and cunningly combining pixels on one of a cube’s faces to add numbers. I had not done things like that in years. Sure, I had printed notes detailing what gametype labels did what in Halo Reach’s Forge mode. I had hand-written notes describing the locations of audio-diaries I had missed in Bioshock. Not since I was a kid had I written out the alphabet vertically, and had a counterpart vertical list next to it, telling me how to read this unreadable code. As the game went on, I learnt a whole new language. And I’d like to think Gomez did too.
But that wasn’t even the best bit. The crowning moment of glory which made me fall for this world was not at the end, when you completed the game, and Gomez went too far back in time and caused THE INCIDENT which wiped out every space-squid on the moon and near destroyed the square-head village, no, it was the glitch level.
This level is set after you have “finished” the game once, and acknowledges that the world of Fez knows that it is a videogame in many ways. It is mimicking very old videogames that had tile-based graphics, and it is combining that with a sphere of light effect, often featured in cave-based platformers of old. I love how the “darkness” outside of the sphere of light is every background tile in the game, all at once. I love how it looks like a kill screen, I love how you’re not 100% sure this is supposed to be happening. I love how it feels like the game is going to crash at any second, especially when you rotate. I love how, as you ascend, the level makes you remember previous portions of the game, simply by showing you one or two patterns of block. It’s like one of those traditional boss-rushes, only with older areas of the game replacing bosses.
And to think, this mostly came from the mind of one man.
I was deeply saddened when Phil Fish said he had halted development on Fez 2. It’s sad because he made an amazing game, yet still got tonnes of shit for it. I would love to play another Fez game, be it in the world of the first Fez game, a new world, or a mixture of both I’m not fussy. As long as it had the same amount of love and devotion, the same amount of attention to detail, the same amount of thought and forward-planning… I’d be a happy man. For now, my Fez t-shirt will have to do.
