Gomez is a 2D creature living in a 2D world. Or is he? When the existence of a mysterious 3rd dimension is revealed to him, Gomez is sent out on a journey that will take him to the very edge of time and space. Use your ability to navigate 3D structures from 4 distinct classic 2D perspectives.
Hello there. It’s been a while but Plug & Play is back! In the time it’s taken for me to get back to you beautiful internet chumps there’s been a lot happening in the gaming world and I’ve since played a few more games. Now Fez is in the spotlight in this article but I managed to play No Man’s Sky and Batman: Arkham Knight too and I’ll mention how my experiences of each of the three differed down below. But first…
Fez continues the tradition of these Plug & Play titles achieving a fantastic marriage of audio and visual design. As a platformer with bright colours, a chirpy electronic soundtrack and stout pixel protagonist it harkens back to the Super Mario formula that’s worked rather well for several decades. The very beginning of the game with its tiered village, quirky villagers and village elder seem only a few ‘Hiiiiyah’s away from calling itself Legend of Zelda but though the hallmarks of retro gaming’s heritage can be seen, Fez quickly asserts itself as a unique game quickly after that when you obtain… The Fez.
Watch for a taste of the hat-wearing wonderment.
This was the moment I really sat up and paid attention to this game. Lulling you into a familiar routine of simple 2D platformer navigation, the game then adds the 3rd dimension and your world literally opens up before you. I think it’s a stroke of genius from designer Phil Fish to then direct the player back through the aforementioned village but with the ability to see it from this new perspective. This experience is made even better by the fact that all the villagers refuse to believe that their world is actually three dimensional, not even walking in the areas that are accessible to you now. For the rest of the game you traverse an intricate series of platforming puzzles collecting cubes to open doors, keys to open chests and moving through the world and then that’s where I drifted away.
Keys and cubes to open chests and doors to find more keys and cubes just wasn’t the motivation I needed to go through each part of the game. Hotline Miami had such a relentless trance-like inevitability to it that you couldn’t help but put one foot in front of the next. LIMBO of course has A HUGE FUCKING SPIDER chasing you which I’ve still clearly not moved on from but posed one of the most compelling reasons to run from one side of the screen to the next. Fez is a game with a much more relaxed approach to progression and much more forgiving with its players. Respawns occur only seconds after death, no enemies try to nick your tasselled hat and large portions of the game open up quickly without level or experience restrictions. Essentially the game is inviting but doesn’t seem overly committed to the task of egging you on.
Which is how I found myself playing two massive blockbuster games before returning to Fez. And believe me, I felt terrible about it. Not bad like you’ll feel when playing The Walking Dead Game or gods forbid Spec Ops: The Line but more like forgetting to water a house plant or call your Grandparents for several weeks. I mean, here’s this charming platformer with stunning audio/visual design and I slunk off when it slowed down a little and dazzling blockbuster titles waved their high resolution pixels in my face. Why did I do it?
Well, because my favourite thing about video games just isn’t really IN Fez. See, I’m a writer, as you well know because of the words you’re reading right now, so things like story and narrative progression tend to be my favourite parts of the games I love but Fez is rather light in the story department. A largely indirect (some would say unimportant) story surfaces now and again but the game is an opportunity for level design and gameplay to take centre stage and for me that’s only half of what games can do. Where it excels in its gameplay and control it fails to deliver emotion or heightened stakes that might make me feel invested. Some gamers will find the puzzle solving for the sake of puzzle-solving a lot of fun and perhaps mentally satisfying, but not for me. Playing No Man’s Sky I found the same thing. Exploring world after world, acquiring upgrades and better ships all for… what? I had no personal stake in continuing, there’s no princess to save and I wasn’t running from any HUGE FUCKING SPIDERS (though I did find a some pretty nasty centipedes). Where I DID find this was in the emotionally rich Batman: Arkham Knight. It’s a little unfair to compare one of the biggest triple A titles with a quintessential indie champion but I barreled through Knight because the whole game is conflict and conflict is how you create a story. Something Arkham Knight does with cinematic aplomb.
Eventually I returned to Fez, I decided to make more progress and to its credit the game brought new challenges in and continued to turn the platformer genre on its head whilst upholding a few of the traditional elements. But it’s a game that isn’t designed to tell you a tale as such and so I decided to adjust how I looked at the game. Fez is a fantastic demonstration of gameplay mechanics, physics and impeccable design in how the game is structured, how it looks and how it sounds. The quality of level design and the game’s layout of each world is great, forcing you to think laterally and vertically to get to where you need to go as well as introducing multiple angles to look at each level. When that gets predictable the game introduces levels that change by rotating a switch or ringing a bell two worlds back so you’re never stuck for a challenge.
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Tom MidgleyI play, design and write about games when I'm not hoping for someone to pay me to do these things. Archives
October 2017
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