Fez

Fez is a puzzle-platform video game developed by Polytron Corporation and published by Trapdoor, in which a two-dimensional creature discovers that its world is in fact three-dimensional.¹⁷³ The player controls Gomez, a blob-headed sprite living in a peaceful, two-dimensional pixel village, who witnesses a monolithic golden cube disintegrate into hundreds of fragments and then receives a magical red hat—the fez of the title—that grants him knowledge of his world’s greatest and oldest secret: there are actually three dimensions.³⁶ His task is to gather the cube fragments that made up the golden “hexahedron” and restore order to a universe threatening to tear itself apart.⁶⁹

The game’s defining mechanic lets the player rotate the world through 90 degrees before it snaps back into a flat plane, revealing 3D structures from four distinct classic 2D perspectives.¹⁷⁶ The perspective shift realigns platforms and reveals hidden areas: a yawning gap becomes an easy jump, a thin sliver becomes a wide gangway, and impassable distances are squashed into nothingness, operating with, as one reviewer put it, “optical illusion-as-law”—if the world can be aligned to appear traversable, it is.⁶⁹ Puzzles do not stop at perspective; the game requires players to shift planes to interact with objects in various ways for a single element of a puzzle, leading to multifaceted solutions.⁹ Structurally the game asks the player to collect glowing cubes to unlock new areas—32 cubes reach the exit and the climax, after which a New Game+ offers 32 more, many of them “anti-cubes” that reward the game’s harder, frequently fourth-wall-breaking riddles.⁶ There is no combat and no enemies, and falling to one’s “death” simply returns Gomez to the last safe platform.⁶¹¹

Development and inspiration

Fez was the work of a two-man team: designer and artist Phil Fish of Polytron Corporation and programmer Renaud Bédard, with an atmospheric synth score by composer Rich Vreeland, known as Disasterpeace.⁶⁸ The concept grew out of an abandoned collaboration between Fish and creative partner Shawn McGrath, who had proposed an abstract puzzler using a similar “four sides” mechanic; the two fell out over Fish’s desire to make a more traditional platformer with that twist, and the project died.⁸ Fish took the “squares = cubes” aesthetic forward alone, posting a note on deviantArt seeking a programmer; Bédard was the first to reply.⁸ Fish said everything in the game—“the mechanics, puzzle, art, lore and logic”—derived organically from the single idea that squares are actually cubes, and anything unrelated to it was cut.⁸

Bédard’s solution to rendering the world was what he called Trixel Technology, a three-dimensional interpretation of the 2D pixel in which each player-facing side—the “trile”—is built from smaller cubes so it reads as believable pixel art rather than a smooth voxel surface.⁸ Fish characterized the underlying technology as modest, saying the game “could have been made at any point in the last 15 years; it’s just polygons made to look like pixels with a clever twist”.⁸

Fish’s stated inspiration was the Nintendo of his boyhood: reviewers described him as devoted to unearthing the sense of surprise and secret wonder felt on first playing a Metroid, Zelda, or Super Mario, and Fez was read as “the most authentic exploration of the NES-era of games” one critic had played.⁶⁹ Where other nostalgic indie titles paid homage to the Super Mario and Zelda series, Polytron looked to a harder, more obscure tier of 8-bit games such as Faxanadu and Castlevania II, whose obtuseness Gomez’s journey through the ruins of a dead alien civilization deliberately echoes.⁹ Its secret languages scrawled on walls—one composed entirely of Tetris shapes—and its treasure maps, warp doors, and hidden worlds drew comparison to the impish design of Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima, and Tim Schafer.⁶ One reviewer likened the game to a Miyamoto version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a peaceable game of exploration and riddling shot through with 1970s surrealism.⁶

The plane-shifting mechanic itself was not new, and reviewers were consistent about its antecedents. The game was described as a combination of the wraparound platforming of the cult 1980s game Nebulus with the Escher-like spatial non-sequiturs of Echochrome.³⁶ Other critics named Echochrome and the Paper Mario games—particularly Super Paper Mario, which sardonically flipped a 2D world into 3D—as prior explorations of the same trick, while arguing that Fez leaned less heavily on optical illusions than Echochrome and took the idea further than Super Paper Mario.⁵⁷¹¹⁸ The premise also echoed themes presented decades earlier in Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland, in which a two-dimensional being comes to perceive a larger, more complex world.⁵⁷ One writer found the game’s visual look most indebted to Daisuke Amaya’s Cave Story and its spirit kindred to the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, which sought to represent three-dimensional objects within two-dimensional space.¹¹

Release and reception

Fez arrived on Xbox Live Arcade in April 2012, roughly four to five years after it first took root as the underdog darling of the indie game scene, following a famously troubled and much-delayed development.⁹³⁸ It was later released on May 1, 2013 on Steam, where it is classed among indie games and carries popular user-defined tags including platformer, puzzle, pixel graphics, exploration, great soundtrack, and adventure.¹⁷

Reception was strongly positive. Eurogamer awarded it 10 out of 10 and named it Game of the Year for 2012, calling it “a precisely engineered game with a singular vision that’s as old as games itself”.³¹⁰ Reviewers praised the intuitive, playful perspective shift and the “simple joy of exploration” at its heart, though several noted technical problems—frame rate stutters, occasional hard freezes, and confusing navigation with tedious backtracking in the later hours.⁶⁹¹² 1UP gave it a B+, judging that although it occasionally overreached, the “long-awaited dimension-shifting platformer lives up to its clever premise”.¹¹¹² On Steam the game held “Very Positive” standings, with 91% of 6,245 English-language user reviews positive.¹⁷

The game shares its name with the fez, a flat-topped, brimless felt hat worn across the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and North Africa, which takes its name from the Moroccan city of Fez—a historic center for the production of the crimson dye used to color it.²⁰¹³¹⁴