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Since Fez was released via Xbox Live Arcade on April 13, designer and source of fiery headlines Phil Fish has gone underground. Fish has not given an interview to the press since Fez debuted to mostly stellar reviews, a community obsessed with cracking its secrets, and a series of unfortunate technical snafus.

Fish really is turning down interviews. Believe me, I’ve asked.

He did, however, recently speak at the Gamelab conference in Barcelona, Spain in late June. To my surprise, almost nobody noticed. At least, not beyond reports Fish is working on two new games. In his seemingly off-the-cuff talk, Fish finally talked about his reaction to Fez’s release, and the multiples moments of fallout that have ensued.

Fez’s five years of development are now a blur Fish described as “one solid block of *crag*,” a half decade of frustrated sweat, blood, tears and scrutiny that he’s seemingly happy to leave behind. Thousands of man hours later, Fez has been released.

“When you see those videos of triathletes that are finishing a race, but they’re a meter away from the finish line, and their body just shuts down and they shit their pants and vomit and they need that space blanket that they use on the shuttle to warm their bodies because their bodies are just shutting down?” he said. “That’s how it felt like.”

Despite warning the crowd he wouldn’t talk about the development of Fez very much, Fish couldn’t help himself. His musings largely centered around his interactions with fans, Indie Game: The Movie, Microsoft, and figuring out how to market a game that’s mostly been in his head.

Fish said the last year of development was a never ending carrot on a stick for all parties involved. Polytron signed its original agreement with Microsoft (which does not own the Fez intellectual property, Polytron does) four years ago, but in 2011, the end finally seemed in sight. Fish and his programming partner Renaud Bédard kept telling Microsoft the game was just a month away, but that month kept repeating over and over again.

“That was pretty frustrating, and obviously there was a lot of anticipation and people were getting really impatient and we were getting nervous about taking too long and maybe people weren’t going to be interested in Fez anymore,” he said. “But, eventually, we pulled it off and that was weird because one moment you wake up and you have nothing to do anymore. You go from doing the same stuff all day, every day, for five years, and one day, you’re not allowed to touch it anymore.”

The immediate reaction to Fez was curiosity, and, perhaps, a tinge of disappointment. Had we really waited five years for yet another clever 3D platformer, one without particularly great platforming? The true genius of Fez laid in wait, beyond the first playthrough. It was fascinating to watch Jeff, the first of us to play the game, go from scratching his head at the game’s surprising simplicity to rabidly obsessed with the cryptological endgame on the other side.

Fish knew part of Fez wasn’t being conveyed as it was being shown to players and press.

“Everybody knew that it did the rotating thing and you jumped around and all that, but I felt we weren’t really communicating the feel of the game,” he said. “We wanted to showcase the ambiance and music and how it feels to spend time in that world.”

The result was Fez’s fantastic “long screen shots,” which doubled as trailers. In hindsight, even those never truly outlined the game’s true depths and doublespeak, a secret that Fish kept under his, er, fez. In his talk, Fish didn’t discuss the mysteries within Fez and what they might mean. Just recently, a group released an iOS app to quickly translate Fez’s in-game language, a joyous, if maddening, hurdle for early players.

By sheer coincidence, Fez’s release lined up with acclaimed documentary (and potential HBO series) Indie Game: The Movie moving through the festival circuit. The movie would later become a lightning rod of its own in relationship with Fez. Before that, it was promotion that money just can’t buy.

“The movie was supposed to come out like a year ago, it took way longer, and the game took way longer, we just really didn’t think they were going to align like that,” he said. “But then they did.”

Same with his Microsoft deal, agreeing to be part of Indie Game: The Movie happened years ago, back when Fish figured it would be a documentary about the independent gaming scene, a feature full of talking heads. The finished product ended up closely following the stressful development of Fez and Super Meat Boy, with Jonathan Blow’s Braid acting as a guiding post for a successful indie. Even my fiancee was tearing up by the end.

The moment everyone remembers is Fish’s emotional blowup at PAX East, in which Fish is hoping to resolve a dispute with former business partner and Fez developer Jason DeGroot (who was not originally mentioned in the movie, but more on that later). The movie portrays Fish’s multiple meltdowns, a combination of stress over his obviously strained relationship with DeGroot and showing Fez to the public for the first time. Everything culminated in this trip to Boston.

“It was like a five-day panic attack, and I was freaking out the whole time,” he said. “I was mic’d and I had a camera pointed at me the entire time, and every time that they saw that I was about to *crag*ing lose it, they were like “Okay, Phil, we need to talk to you now, you know why it’s important that we capture these moments.” No, leave me alone, I’m really not in a good mood. Then we kind of had to do it. I’m not going to screw up their movie. I said I’m going to be part of it.”

Fish admitted the movie has done more good than bad for both him and independent games, even if Indie Game: The Movie has, in his mind, given people a skewed perspective of him.

“I met a whole bunch of people last night,” he said, “and we went out and we partied and they were all like ‘Hey, it’s really nice to see that you’re not always super depressed!’ That was just one really dark period in my life that is now immortalized for everyone to see.”

Fish described Fez as a financial success, though not one that will make him rich, ala Minecraft. He’s currently working on two projects, one of which he’d previously been hacking away at during the creation of Fez (this is probably Super HyperCube, though he didn't say) and another based on an idea he’s had in his head for years.

It doesn’t sound like he’ll immediately work with Microsoft again, though. Fish doesn’t regret signing with it originally, back when Microsoft was leading the digital charge with XBLA. These days, Fish seems more excited about the possibilities afforded by Steam. Several issues seem to have compounded Fish’s disillusionment with Microsoft.

One, like everyone else, Polytron had any control over the release date and price of Fez. It could “influence” the decision, not make it. While it mostly got what it wanted (April 13, lower price point), there was always the chance that Microsoft could have done whatever it wanted. This has been a common criticism of Microsoft’s XBLA program, including the decision to have slots that are, essentially, privately bought and sold between publishers.

Two, a number of issues post-release prompted Polytron to work on a patch. Releasing a patch on XBLA costs $40,000, according to Fish (Double Fine’s Tim Schafer has separately mentioned this figure). Microsoft gave Polytron a pass on the first patch, but when the patch was approved by Microsoft certification, released to the masses and caused a small number of users to lose their saved progress, Microsoft pulled the patch.

A follow-up patch will now cost Polytron $40,000. That patch is not yet released.

“It’s this whole certification process that Microsoft has, which is in place to ensure there’s a certain level of quality in the games,” he said. “They don’t want games to be constantly patched all the time, and I understand the reasoning for that, but god damnit, it takes forever, it costs a fortune--you have to pay them for it--and it doesn’t work.”

Nonetheless, Fish was ultimately happy with Microsoft’s treatment of what mattered most, the game.

“They understood that it was a personal project,” he said. “They were completely hands-off all through development, they never tried to change anything or steer the game in one direction or the other. They let us make the game that we wanted to make, and for that I’m super grateful.”

He’s less grateful for some of the headlines just before and following the game’s release. Controversy follows Fish like a loyal dog, an ingrained perception Fish blames on the media and himself.

“It’s been pretty hard dealing with all of the million bullshit controversies I always find myself involved with because I have a big, dumb mouth, and I don’t have a filter,” he said.

At the Game Developers Conference, Fish criticized the current state of Japanese game development, which sent some of the audience, and then the Internet, into a tizzy. I still haven't been able to obtain a full transcript, though at one point I was in discussions to interview the developer who asked the fabled question to Fish. It didn't happen.

Separately, some viewers of Indie Game: The Movie wondered why Fish’s business partner, whom Fish verbally rants about several times, was never named or given a chance to tell his side. He's a narrative ghost. That partner is Jason DeGroot, sometimes referred to as Game Boy Jason. He’s a producer behind Sound Shapes, and worked alongside Fish on Fez for a long stretch. In fact, he helped found Polytron, and his separation from the company and Fez was Fish’s emotional arc in Indie Game: The Movie.

For the recent home release of Indie Game: The Movie, the filmmakers added a note to the end credits:

My own sources close to DeGroot said that was an inaccurate characterization: he was never asked. The filmmakers eventually admitted the wording was incorrect, and issued an updated version of the film with this phrasing:

Fish alluded to his issues with DeGroot when asked about his biggest lesson from the last few years.

“Never, ever, ever, ever start a company, a corporation, a project, any kind of thing where there’s ownership involved, don’t start it 50/50,” he said. “Because if you disagree, that’s it. [...] We didn’t know what we were doing, so we didn’t have a shotgun clause in our contract--basically, that says ‘oh, if you don’t do this agreement, one of us has authority over certain areas.’ We didn’t have anything like that, and we came to a pretty big disagreement, and then that was it. A disagreement that stayed a disagreement for a long time, and it was stalling the game.”

"We" most likely means DeGroot.

Of course, he couldn’t resist a parting shot about how you pick a partner, either.

“Make sure they’re not assholes,” he said.

During the Q&A, someone inevitably asked if Fez would escape Xbox 360 exclusivity, and while Fish would not explicitly say yes, he didn’t try very hard to say no, either.

“Maybe?” he said. “We are looking at porting the game to other platforms, but there’s nothing concrete about it, so we won’t say which ones, just to be a tease. But, of course, I want the game to be on everything, I don’t want to be stuck on Xbox Live Arcade. I spent five years of my life working on this, I want everybody to play it.”

In other words, look for Fez on Steam in the near future.

You can watch the entirety of Fish's talk from Gamelab for yourself on YouTube.

The almost absurd obsession with getting things just right often displayed by Polytron founder Phil Fish is well known among most independent gaming circles, especially now that said obsession has been shown to the world at large via Fish's role in Indie Game: The Movie. Having seen the anger and anxiety Phil shows when things don't go quite right, it's not too terribly difficult for one to imagine how he might be reacting to the realization that the first patch for Fez is kind of broken.

Yes, Polytron's long-awaited patch to its previously long-awaited Xbox Live Arcade game has arrived, and it does fix many of the issues intended, including several crash bugs and save file issues. However, it also comes with a very important caveat, in that it may now read your save file as corrupted. The good news is that there is a potential workaround. If you flush your Xbox 360 cache, it should fix the problem. However, if it doesn't, then there is currently no other solution.

Polytron, for its part, is "floored" that the issue wasn't discovered during testing, and will update on the situation once they know more.

So, hey, maybe don't install that patch just yet. And if you see Phil Fish walking around cursing up a storm, maybe give him a little breathing room until all of this is resolved. There's no sense in upsetting him more than he almost assuredly already is.

A man sits hunched over his keyboard. It's some ungodly hour of the morning, and he sits, staring at his computer screen. He subsists on a steady diet of soda and coffee, and appears not to have seen the sun in weeks. He has no social life, though this is largely of his own design. He doesn't have time for people, because he has a game to finish. The strings of code that dominate his computer monitor might as well be gibberish to most, but to the figure slumped in his office chair, it's the foundation of a video game, one that he is furiously trying to finish in order to complete it by an important marketing deadline.

This is an image that's probably all too familiar for those of us who count ourselves as enthusiasts of the video game industry. We at least have some idea of what it takes to make a game, independent or otherwise. But to those who are only tangentially familiar with what goes into these trifling digital entertainments of ours, it's a striking image. The idea of suffering for one's art is hardly anything new, but to those who don't necessarily consider video games to be art, it's an unfamiliar experience to see someone putting so much of their heart and soul into games where sentient meat sacks dodge giant saw blades and fight evil cybernetic babies with top hats and monocles.

This is what makes Indie Game: The Movie, the recently-toured documentary from Canadian filmmakers Lisanne Pijot and James Swirsky, so great and, frankly, important. There aren't very many documentaries about video games in general, a point that James and Lisanne echoed both during a Q&A at a New York City screening I attended, and in a Skype conversation I had with them yesterday. More to the point, there are even fewer documentaries about video games that are able to put the experience of game development in relatable terms to those who don't necessarily have more than a passing interest in gaming. Indie Game: The Movie does exactly that. It shows the pains and struggles of people trying to create something they're passionate about creating. It doesn't matter if they're making a video game or a film or an erotic cake. What they're making means something to these people, and by proxy of the talented filmmakers, what they're making means something to us, too.

Those of you who spend a lot of time perusing video game sites probably already have an idea of the stories contained within Indie Game: The Movie, but for those who aren't aware, a brief refresher. The film follows the development and post-development experiences of three different game makers: Fez creator Phil Fish, Team Meat members Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, and enigmatic Braid designer Jonathan Blow. The three stories are varied in scope and stress--Blow, for instance, has no new game to talk about, while the others are each rushing to meet differing deadlines--but they all offer individual takes on what it takes to create an extension of one's self via video games.

Fish's story is the one that's dominated much of the media coverage, and with good reason. Fish comes off as a live wire pretty much from the moment he appears on screen. He is brutally self-effacing and incredibly anxious during this period, which was filmed about 18 months before Fez was finally released. He talks a great deal about his inspirations for the game, as well as the pressures he's found himself under after splitting with his former business partner (who is represented by a photo obscured by pixels through the entire film) and subsequent attempts to get him to sign off on an official split agreement that would allow him to show the game at PAX East.

Team Meat, on the other hand, are within sight of finishing Super Meat Boy when the film opens. We learn early on of the friendship that binds Edmund and Tommy together. Despite their bi-coastal working relationship--Edmund resides in Santa Cruz, California, while Tommy lives near his family in North Carolina--the two communicate daily, laboring dozens and dozens of hours each week to try and push Meat Boy into the stage of completion so that it can go up as part of an Xbox Live promotion in the fall of 2010. The promotion means additional marketing help that self-starters like themselves desperately need, but the game still has a lot of work to go.

Blow's role in the film is more instructional and introspective. He speaks of the development process of Braid, talking in plainspoken terms about what it meant to him to build a game he viewed as an extension of his own personality and ideas, which aren't necessarily spelled out for the player. He expresses his frustration with the fact that many players simply didn't understand the greater meanings he'd infused the game with, even acknowledging his slightly obsessive tendency to reply to nearly any commentary on the Internet that he believes misunderstands his vision.

Each of these stories contains enough intriguing information and personal drama to easily fill a 90-minute runtime, but it's the emotional elements of each story that make Indie Game: The Movie more than just a documentary about video games. Around the halfway point of the doc, Blow more or less drops out of the equation, and the directors hyper-focus on Meat Boy and Fez's big crunches. During these periods, we see these guys at their most threadbare. Edmund spends so many hours working on the game that he barely sees his wife, who often is literally sitting ten feet behind him. Tommy's only outside contact comes in brief family visits and occasional late night jaunts to a deserted local diner. Phil is an outright mess, tearing his hair out over his former business partner's either inability, or unwillingness to sign the contract that will let him show the game at PAX. In one particularly harrowing interview, Phil sits in his hotel lobby, speaking in hurried bursts of panic and rage at the prospect of coming all this way, only to be derailed by the lack of a single signature. As someone who has suffered from his own anxiety issues, I can see in this scene the makings of a full-blown panic attack occurring right in front of me. It's an uncomfortably familiar thing to watch.

Make no mistake: Indie Game: The Movie can be a very dark story. Phil at one point even confesses that he'd likely kill himself if Fez never made it to market (thankfully, it eventually did.) Whether that's viewed as pure hyperbole or a realistic threat probably depends on how well you know Phil, but from the outside, watching it on film, it felt painfully serious.

That darkness is something some game makers have taken umbrage with in regards to the film. Papo & Yo creator Vander Caballero expressed some concern over the dour tone of the film to Penny Arcade writer Ben Kuchera, saying, "'Oh, if my game doesn't work out I am over! I will kill myself!' No, make another game! Create! This is fun!" Similarly, veteran designer Derek Smart took to Twitter today to tell prospective watchers of the film to "note that not all of us devs are clueless pricks who complain all the time," while also championing Blow's commentary in the film.

While I see both Caballero and Smart's points, I don't necessarily agree that the film's portrayal of its subjects is that of chronic complainers who hate what they do. Yes, Phil and Tommy's expressions of frustration can come off like the rantings of extremely angry people, but they're angry because of situations that impede their progress on creating something they love. If anything, Indie Game: The Movie shows that developing a game is really *crag*ing hard, and not the sort of thing that anyone can just do. That's an important perspective to show, given the current lack of knowledge much of the mainstream world has about our favorite entertainment medium.

And it's not as if there aren't triumphs to be shown. Though Blow seemingly considers his success with Braid something of a blessing and a curse, there's no question that he has the opportunity to work on his newest project mostly unencumbered by publisher meddling because he established himself with that game. When Phil finally breaks through and gets Fez shown, repeated issues with the preview build don't necessarily dampen the excitement he feels seeing people play and enjoy his labor of love. And as for Tommy and Edmund, there is perhaps no sweeter moment than seeing Edmund's wife, Danielle, break down into tears as she sees her husband's hard work pay off. This is a movie that shows both the agony and the ecstasy of game development. Maybe it leans a tad hard on the agony, but it's not as bad as some people might say.

And, of course, there are those who wonder why more perspectives weren't given. It's generally public knowledge that Pijot and Swirsky also filmed a good deal of footage with thatgamecompany's Jenova Chen, Passage designer Jason Rohrer, and Aquaria creators Alec Holowka and Derek Yu. That footage will appear on the special edition DVD and Blu-ray release, which the filmmakers say are still in production and "just need to have pressed," but didn't make it into the film because, quite frankly, it would have been just too much. In Indie Game: The Movie, Pijot and Swirsky narrow their focus to the three most compelling stories that came out of their 300 hours worth of footage, and it's better for that fact. A documentary has to have a tight, engaging narrative. Otherwise, it runs the risk of just turning into an instructional info dump. It's the same reason why it isn't just called Video Game: The Movie. While it might have been nice to get some perspective from those currently working in the more mainstream, big budget game space, it would have diluted the story at the film's core. The laser-like focus on those stories might not make Indie Game an all-encompassing view of the entire industry, but it does make it a genuinely great film.

I recommend Indie Game: The Movie for anyone who has even a passing interest in games, game development, or just the process of artistic creation in general. This is a universally watchable documentary, something the game industry has rarely had before, and desperately needs as the rest of the world becomes more and more aware of the medium. Does the film have its flaws? Certainly, but none of those flaws detract from the movie's central goal of capturing highly personal independent game development experiences, warts and all, and making them into a story anyone can appreciate.

Indie Game: The Movie is now available via iTunes, Steam, and as a DRM-free download from the film's official website. DVD and Blu-ray versions currently do not have a release date, but are in the works. Expect the movie to appear on Netflix and other streaming services sometime in the (hopefully) foreseeable future.

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.