Fez Message Board

I’m almost finished reading Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, and I’m starting to get the itch to download Game Salad, design software aimed at non-programmers. I have no interest in becoming a professional game designer, but going through the exercise of designing a video game sounds really worthwhile.

We’ll see?

Even when Anthropy is merely walking through the basic steps to designing a game with today’s tools, you feel pushed to do...well, something. Anything. A compulsion to create. She is looking over your shoulder, and you you’re compelled to give this damn thing a shot. Anthropy’s whole book feels like a pitch to the apathetic creative who’s always wanted to make a game but figured actually doing so was out of reach. It’s not, and the difference between making a game and not making a game the doing.

Never following up on this musing would neatly line up with the horror screenplay I’ve always said I’m going to write. I’d tell you the title of said screenplay, but, hell, I can’t even find the document anymore. Clearly, it’s a priority.

Hey, You Should Play This

• Phi by Thomas Bowker

If you finished Fez, and by finished I mean go for a ride on the off-the-rails cryptography train, you probably weren’t ready for another set of logic puzzles by the end. I mean, I guess you could, but how the hell is your brain not total mush? I’m expecting a series of games directly influenced by Fez in the next few years, and Phi is one of them. Phi came from the Ludum Dare, and it takes but only a few moment of roaming around to realize just how much designer Thomas Bowker took from Phil Fish’s insanity. The world itself reminded me of Proteus, actually, especially when I found myself unable to crack the puzzle, despite seemingly having the evidence, and I kept chasing down frogs.

• Intense Staring Simulator by Games by Zed

You already had me with your name, Intense Staring Simulator, and slayed me with your writing. There isn’t much to Intense Staring Simulator (if you’re stuck on the last puzzle, try looking around), but when I mull the kind of game I could possibly make with zero design skills, a game like Intense Staring Simulator comes to mind. The dream of democratizing game development is to allow people to craft interactive experiences that play to their individual strengths, rather than conforming to the traditional expectations of a game, which they (me?) may be no good at.

You Should Read These, Too

• Most Popular Video Games Are Dumb. Can We Stop Apologizing for Them Now? by Taylor Clark for Kotaku

Jonathan Blow is already a subject that’s sure to rub some people the wrong way, and when Taylor Clark profiled the designer of Braid and the upcoming The Witness for The Atlantic, Clark took a swipe at games by categorizing most them them as pretty dumb. Not Vinny thinking about Prototype 2 dumb, but Jeff thinking about Prototype 2 dumb. You know, dumb. Clark’s overall message was lost in his word choice, and so Kotaku provided Clark with a platform to respond. Clark doesn’t believe we have to settle for nonsense when it comes to our video game narratives, and to accept the status quo as anything games are capable are achieving is selling the medium short. I’m inclined to agree with him, and figure more people would, too, had he not used the word dumb. That was dumb. But...

• Dumbness In Games, Or, The Animal As A System by Matthew Burns for (his blog) Magical Wasteland

...then I read Matthew Burns’ response to Clark’s piece, and wondered if I’d been wrong all along. Make sure you read the pieces back-to-back. I’m not a game designer, and I’m only at the beginning stages of becoming anything resembling a critic--I just don’t have enough experience to draw from yet. Burns has neither of those problems, and in his public reply to the question of "dumb," makes the argument that we’re all expecting something that isn’t possible. It’s not to say video games are not capable of delivering the strong storytelling found in other mediums, but that we’re asking game designers and writers to graft that into places where it’s either impossible or very, very hard.

With Fez, you get as much out of it as you're willing to put in. That is, the game works on multiple layers. On the surface, it's a breezy little platformer that you should be able to cruise through without much difficulty. After all, there are no real enemies, and very few spots along the main path through the game that require actual skill with a controller to complete. As a result, you're given a flashy little ending and the ability to go back into the world and find anything you may have missed. But if you just collect 32 cubes and "finish" the game, you're barely seeing what Fez actually has to offer. And the puzzles you must solve to get everything else are occasionally inventive, often maddening, and always interesting.

Fez is short on story and long on atmosphere. You wake up as Gomez, a 2D boy in a 2D world. After being granted a fez of your own, though, you gain the ability to rotate the world by 90-degrees, letting you use perspective shifts to see the world from four different angles. Typically, this means you'll climb as high as you can, see a platform that seems to be out of reach, and rotate the world until you find an orientation that closes the gap between where you are and where you want to go. It's stylish, but there isn't really anything too tricky about navigating the world. So if you're looking at Fez in hopes of finding a perspectively-minded puzzle game along the lines of Crush, you're probably going to be disappointed. It'll probably only take a few hours to rotate the world around and collect the minimum number of cubes required to complete the game that way.

It's the rest of Fez that makes it something special. As you dig beneath the faux-retro aesthetic, Fez reveals all sorts of hidden elements. It forces you to pay attention to everything, from the paintings in a room to the scribblings left behind on classroom chalk boards. It never comes right out and says what's what, but as you explore the world and start to recognize what you're actually seeing around you, it creates a set of magical moments. On the downside, once you've made this realization (or, more likely, once you've looked up the main secrets), the game quickly devolves into using your map to figure out which areas still have secrets in them, heading there, and quickly collecting yet another anti-cube, which is the game's main hidden item. Between regular cubes and anti-cubes, you'll find 64 cubes in the world of Fez. And to open the game's final door, you'll need them all. You'll also have to finish the game once to unlock an additional ability that's absolutely necessary if you're looking for secrets. While the uncovering of keys to the game's secrets and learning how to interpret the world around you leads to some astoundingly revelatory moments, the way the game boils down to doing the same sort of task over and over again to collect most of the hidden items is disappointing.

Exploring the world of Fez is wonder on its own. Despite its deliberately simple look, the world has a collection of vastly different areas to explore, and I was continually surprised by the number of different-looking areas to uncover. What starts as a collection of villages in various states, each connected by a sort of core or hub quickly expands to reveal sewer systems that glow with the monochromatic flair of an original Game Boy, an observatory, an enormous bell tower, an equally huge clock, forests, caves, and plenty of even more surprising areas that play around with deliberate glitches and other great-looking effects. There are tons of things to simply see and study in Fez. They all warrant close inspection, too, both because they're worth examining for their artistic merit and because finding the hidden secrets that lie beneath Fez's outer layer requires you to go in with sharp eyes and an even sharper mind.

At times it seems like every single piece of Fez's world is deliberately placed in order to teach you something about the world. Picking up what Fez is putting down is something that many players may completely fail to do, and those players are likely to come away from the game feeling like it's an easy, dumb adventure with zero challenge. Consider this your chance to lord superiority over those people, whether you figure it all out on your own (which seems pretty unlikely for most folks) or consult message boards and FAQs in search of pointers in the right direction.

While parts of Fez deal in cute, deliberate video game glitches, these are undercut by several very real issues. On multiple occasions, I've had the game simply quit back to the Xbox 360 dashboard without warning. Thankfully, the game auto-saves quite regularly, so I never lost much progress. It sounds like some other players are experiencing more dramatic problems, such as loops that prevent their save game from loading, and so on. Additionally, the game's frame rate often bogs down when you first load into an area, causing stuttery transitions from one zone to another as well as slowdown once you get to where you're going. Some of these problems are more crippling than others, but it all combines to make Fez feel like a product in need of some further clean-up.

Fez really caught me by surprise. On my initial playthrough, the game was downright maddening because it was impossible to know if I should be paying attention to all the symbols and items around the world as I hunted around for enough cubes to finish the game. Then, as I started to figure out what it was actually asking me to do, I started dreading the idea of busting out graph paper and attempting to piece the mysteries together for myself. I ended up taking the coward's way out by visiting a message board or two to get me pointed in the right direction, but once I was over that initial hump, traversing the world and decoding the "real" world of Fez was intensely gratifying. And going to visit the puzzles that I allowed a message board to solve for me to see how the game's developers intend for you to discover this information is unlike anything you've seen in recent history. It's just the right mixture of charm and insanity. Even if you end up letting a collective of Internet sleuths guide you by the hand as you work your way through the game's cubes, anti-cubes, artifacts, and other items, Fez still somehow manages to be worth seeing, if only to marvel at how much weird work went into making what we all thought was just a retro-styled perspective-shifting puzzle game into something decidedly more mind-bending.

#fez After its launch on Friday, "about TWENTY THOUSAND PEOPLE (!!)" supplied "more testing" than the game had received in the past five years, according to Polytron programmer Renaud Bedard. "So, as it happens, bugs popped up. Some pretty serious." More »

• Eurogamer (100/100): "It's during this stage that you'll seriously tackle the game's many secrets - all handily marked, but not at all spoiled, on the head-spinning 3D map screen. Think Miyamoto, Kojima or Schafer at their most impish: treasure maps, invisible platforms, secret messages delivered in unexpected ways, puns and tricks of the light."
• OXM (95/100): "For an experience that could've drowned in an overreliance on using familiar signposts from what's come before it, Fez succeeds in celebrating the past in a smart, joyous way that has us incredibly excited for gaming's future."
• Edge (90/100): "Draw lines between distant landmarks; forge connections that reveal the logic of a set piece; untangle the story in short, gleeful bursts. The route you pick through Polytron's floating world is nearly impossible to verbalise, while its puzzles resolve themselves in your mind unexpectedly, in clear, wordless chunks. There's really no language to cover many of the things you get up to in Fez. For a videogame in 2012, that may be the ultimate endorsement."
• Gamespot (85/100): "Fez goes far deeper than the simple platformer it initially appears as, and figuring out the solutions to the many puzzles is an experience that harks back to a time when games weren't scared of taking off the leash and letting you run wild. Invest time in Fez's colorful world, and enjoy the wealth of incredible ideas buried within. "

it even has a flying rainbow-colored companion... 

After years of development, a couple of re-designs and a few public gaffes later, Fez is finally done.

Designer Phil Fish announced last night on Twitter that Fez would be released via Xbox Live Arcade on a rather appropriate date: April 13. You’ll only be paying 800 Microsoft Points ($10) for it, too.

Fez was first revealed all the way back in 2007, and loosely had a release window several times, only to be delayed over and over again. The game was a source of controversy at this year’s Independent Games Festival, as Fez won for “Excellence in Visual Art” in 2008, which also came with $2,500, and the “Seumas McNally Grand Prize” this year, which came with a much bigger pot: $30,000. The rules on entering twice may change next year.

Fish also made waves around the same time for deeply criticizing Japanese video games during the Q&A session for Indie Game: The Movie, following a question from a Japanese designer in the audience.

In a few weeks, though, we'll have the best way to judge a designer: their game.

Fez designer Phil Fish has been criticized at the Game Developers Conference this week for his harsh, crass comments about the state of Japanese video games.

Fish isn't a Japanese game designer, however. Keiji Inafune, formerly of Capcom, definitely is.

Inafune was at GDC to discuss the future of Japanese games, and his talk was equal parts introspection on his own work and motivational speech for the Japanese developers in the audience.

"For fans of our games, our country, our culture or people, please don't look away from me. Please don't look away from me," he said. "This is the honest truth that I want to share with you today."

The crux of Inafune's argument was pointing out that Japan used to be a trailblazer, and the country has become increasingly lazy in the years since. Japan needs to have the desire to win, he said.

The motivation to "win" was a central point, a refrain Inafune returned to over and over again.

"Back in the day, our Japanese games were used to winning and achieved major, major success," he said. "We celebrated many victories and walked down all sorts of avenues as winners. However, at some point, these wins became losses and not realizing, acknowledging and accepting that fact has lead to today's tragic state of Japanese games."

Even though fans have come around on Mega Man Legends, it was considered a failure for Capcom at the time. The press wasn't interested in Mega Man Legends, and the sales were disappointing. Inafune put his heart and soul into that game's development, but commercially, none of that mattered. What making Mega Man Legends did, however, was push Inafune to work hard and work through adversity.

"That experience is my biggest failure and biggest treasure in my video game career," he said.

After Mega Man Legends, Inafune worked on Resident Evil 2. He found it incredibly easy to get anything he needed approved for the project, and generating press was effortless. Inafune dreamed about a world where he never worked on Mega Man Legends, never experienced passionate failure, and envisioned a scenario where he was used to being treated as he was during Resident Evil 2, and how that could instill a poor work ethic.

"If you never get your hands dirty," he said, "you'll never be able to understand the nitty gritty details."

He made sure to pay his respects to Resident Evil designer Shinji Mikami, pointing out how the original Resident Evil had development similarities to Mega Man Legends. No one believed in the project, no one was talking about the project, and canceling it was a real possibility. Mikami earned his stripes making Resident Evil, and could better appreciate the freedom in Resident Evil 2.

Inafune pointed outside video games for inspiration on how Japan can transform itself: Apple.

"If Apple chose to stick to the glory of the old days with their personal computers and its operating systems, they probably wouldn't be around today," he said. "Steve Jobs chose to develop the brand and not just maintain it, and that's why the Apple we know today exists."

Leaving Capcom was part of Inafune choosing the hard path, rather than the easy. Comcept still has to prove itself, but Inafune sounded upbeat, happy, and optimistic. He's also developing a brand-new game for the Vita, though he didn't provide any details on it.

Even though Inafune was incredibly critical of modern Japanese designers, developer and publishers, he seemed to do so out of desperation and hope. He wants Japan to be big again.

"Time is running out, and we should have realized this when I made that bold statement a few years ago," he said.

“There’s no plans to bring Fez out on any other platforms?” I ask Phil Fish, as he finishes off his sandwich. He chews and I mutter an inward prayer. Oh Gods, let him say PC. “We’re not even thinking about it right now,” he says. “I mean, ultimately, I would like to see it on everything. Why not? But we do have exclusivity with Microsoft, as you do – you find it’s really hard to not do that.”

The Gods are useless. Never pray.(more…)