Fez

If you like your puzzle-platformers to be optimistic and abstract, you should find a welcome home in Fez. This 2012 game was first released by the Polytron Corporation and published by Trapdoor. It was a well-received title at the time, and was seen as an intriguing concept. Basically, you take on the role of Gomez, who is given a fez that allows him to turn his 2D world of existence into a bombastic 3D environment instead.

You can then rotate among the various 2D views of this four-sided 3D world to re-align platforms, solve puzzles, and get to the end of each challenge successfully.

A puzzler like few others

Fez changes the nature of platforming because you have to keep shifting the entire focus of the level. This creates a very different concept where you quite literally have to look at things from various angles to work out what the next step should be. The game, though, was also one that went through some challenges, with a development cycle that lasted for around five years. However, upon release, the game was met with near universal approval.

Developed Phil Fish was quickly noted as being an eccentric figure within games development. The game also faced some challenging issues during development that might have harmed its overall output. The end result, though, is an adorably enjoyable game that builds on the kind of platforming made popular by games such as Echochrome and Paper Mario.

If you like your platformers to force you to really look beyond the obvious, Fez is a great game to play. It forces players to really evaluate the situation as opposed to just blindly hopping through the level. As opposed to just being about timing jumps, it’s all about connecting the level together in the right way so that you can reach the end. It’s a very intriguing, enterprising game that really did a lot to offer new concepts to the platformer genre.

A platformer that changes the rules

If you were to play a platformer and you want almost unparalleled levels of freedom to do more or less whatever you want, you will find a very good game waiting for you in Fez. It offers you the chacen to be very much in control of where you go and what you do. The problems were mostly technical, including an emphasis of backtracking that becomes annoying as well as a series of technical failures that made the game quite buggy for a lot of players.

Pros:

• Intriguing system that builds on the platform-puzzle theme greatly
• Unique ideas put together in an enterprising and engaging world
• Developed and fleshed out puzzles that force you to really think

Cons:

• Awkward control scheme that can become really hard to work with later
• Technical glitches can cause a lot of lost time and effort
• Navigation and controls needed a lot more work