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Though each room is a rotatable 3D world, it is only traversed one side at a time. Rotating the world introduces a unique wrinkle to the age old formula of running and jumping through levels. Fez is abundantly self-aware, and not afraid to poke fun at itself and video games as a whole.Įarly on, Fez reveals itself to be a clever platformer. Or more literally, the game appears to crash and is forced to reboot. The world was only meant to be two dimensional and simple, and so with the introduction of depth reality shatters. The magical hat grants the ability to rotate the world around him, revealing new and hidden depth, but at a cost. One day a golden cube appears in the sky and with it the titular hat that falls upon Gomez's head.
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Though not without its issues, Fez proves itself by providing a unique and surprising twist on one of gaming's most iconic genres.įez stars Gomez, a marshmallow-y character living peacefully in a decidedly two-dimensional village. And now that the game is here, it becomes apparent that there is more to the dimension flipping platformer than meets the eye. Having endured a tumultuous five years of development, during which its design was scrapped and restarted no fewer than three times, it's a small wonder that Fez has finally released. To say that Fez has been a long time coming would be an understatement. Even though I’ve already played the game, revisiting it on Switch was still a novel experience as I reencountered some of my favorite levels, like the one mentioned above.Genre: Action & Adventure / Puzzle Platformer As the game goes on, the level gimmicks get more complex, as Gomez learns to rotate individual objects with switches, change perspectives to connect the track a platform is moving on, and more.Įven though Fez’s controls and mechanics are simple, its levels' multidimensional layout adds a ton of literal and figurative depth to the experience. In some of the simpler levels, changing perspective reveals new platforms or makes platforms closer to each other and easier to jump on. You can view every area you venture through in Fez from 4 different perspectives, which open up lots of new puzzles and platforming opportunities. While some games like Super Paper Mario for Wii and Crush mess with switching between 2 and 3D perspectives, none of them do it as amazingly as Fez. That applies to gameplay too, a Fez is a much more complex puzzle-platformer than it originally seems to be. Just know that there’s more to Fez than meets the eye. The story is surprisingly lore-heavy (this world even has its own alphabet), but it’s worth experiencing for yourself without spoilers. The destruction of the hexahedron also means the world is starting to fall apart, so Gomez must work with a tesseract named Dot to recover cube shards across several levels. This gives Gomez the ability to see the world in 3D by rotating the 2D plane. The situation quickly escalates after an elder in the village gives Gomez the titular Fez hat, and he’s transported to another dimension where a hexahedron shatters. You run, jump, and climb through a 2D village as a small white character named Gomez. On its surface, Fez functions like any other 2D platformer.
#FEZ VIDEO GAME PLATFORMS FREE#
While Fez isn’t free or part of a subscription service, if you adore indie platformers, this one is definitely worth a look. A 2017 iOS port instilled some hope, and now we actually have the game on Nintendo Switch following April’s Indie World Showcase.
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But after its creator quit the industry and canceled its sequel, it seemed unlikely the game would ever come to more platforms. Fez is an unassuming indie game that altered perceptions of the 2D platformer in the early 2010s.
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