I like Fez quite a bit as a game (it does a lot of things really well, and its environments are top notch), although there are some things that I wish it did better here and there.
But what I really love about it is its creation of a particular mood of sadness and melancholy. Not a lot of games manage it quite as well, even when you’d think they would!
@bunp I had a similar feeling when I played it originally - the feeling of exploration and discovery. I don‘t care that the platforming isn’t great or that it‘s full of gimmicks and etc - the vibe is good, the music is good, the visuals are good, and that’s really all I require!
Disasterpeace posted brand new stuff last week (the ambient soundtrack for the new frog game Paradise Marsh) and it barely got a couple thousand views.
https://youtu.be/hW7f5a_rhno
Game is on a new release sale (-10%) until tomorrow by the way. [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1709170/Paradise_Marsh/) / [Switch](https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/paradise-marsh-switch/) / [Xbox](https://www.xbox.com/en-CA/games/store/paradise-marsh/9NC765FKDTN7)
I've spoken about it a bit in other threads, and it was in my Video and Game Poll list. It's maybe the first indie game I ever played. My first session with it was actually my first time meeting a roommate that I lived with for about a year. We met at a coffee shop and then walked to check out the apartment. We talked a bit, and he and I controller passed through the first few levels. I ended up playing through much of our third roommate's playstation plus library and taking a much more serious interest in games.
When I started it on my own in earnest, I was intrigued by how the world started to untangle like some megalithic knot. My favorite moment from when I first played it was seeing the pixelated Moria door and knowing exactly what the game was asking of me. The more obtuse puzzles were intriguing to me, and I took it pretty far past the 100% mark. If memory serves, I got all of the cubes possible and either 2 out of 3 or all of the heart pieces available. I got up to starting to translate the book and then realizing how ridiculous that task would be and calling it a day. I did keep a scrap of paper with the alphabet, numbers, and what all the tetromino blocks meant.
I think I mentioned this on a recent show thread, but I had the experience of frequently seeing grandparents who would end family dinners with a round of logic puzzles and brain teasers. I don't really think this boosted my IQ or anything, but it certainly fortified my patience for impenetrable puzzles.
I don't think I ever got the same feeling from the game. I think there was a bit of loss going through the formerly inhabited city and library, but this sparked more of an Indiana Jonesesque sense of adventure to me. I felt ponderous during most of the game: trying to understand what each different part of the world was, making sense of the language. Even the cemetery zone felt sort of cheeky and cute to me with the owls flying around and the mausoleum marked with “ashes to ashes, dots to dots.”
even if this video does layout the general systems of fez
who knows, maybe ill come back to fez in a year having forgotten everything and try to unlock those secrets with the information in my brain half remembering the solutions
just came in here to say that 1) i loved Fez and can't believe it was more than ten years ago that i played it.
2) one of my absolute favourite car-drivin' memories was in the summer after Fez came out, when i drove along the entire coastline of [Kochi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLJR3WR1M-I) (where i lived at the time) blasting the Fez soundtrack in the late afternoon in my shitty 2000 Suzuki Kei.
and 3) it's great that you're back, @"Emily"#p90124 , and i'm glad that you enjoyed your Fez time (and that Fez holds up, ten years later!).
As someone with a background in philosophy Fez was a really interesting time, because it‘s one of the few games that, to my knowledge, are centered around the concept of hard onthology and metaphysics. It’s a game that definitely talks about the condition of possibility (a historical concept defined by Kant), down to being based around some of the most common examples to explain the idea:
>
A condition of possibility is a necessary framework for the possible appearance of a given list of entities. It is often used in contrast to the unilateral causality concept, or even to the notion of interaction. For example, consider a cube made by an artisan. All cubes are three-dimensional. If an object is three-dimensional, then it is an extended object. But extension is an impossibility without space. Therefore, space is a condition of possibility because it is a necessary condition for the existence of cubes to be possible. Note, however, that space did not cause the cube, but that the artisan did, and that the cube and space are distinct entities, so space is not part of the definition of cube.
It's a game that takes some aspects of the videogame imagery and iconography (the jump from 2D to 3D, the pixel/cube as a motif, etc.) and go hard into creating a mythology around these ideas and talking about how reality (in the context of the game) is possible and how or what are its foundations. It's a lovely game that I also think you only get to experience exactly one time, because that pulling of the thread via the achievements and the meta-game that emerges from engaging with the anti-cubes is something that only really works once! Which is perhaps the reason why it hasn't left a mark as deep as other games for me, but for the 5.9 hours I was playing it (according to steam) it was great.
I think I still have somewhere the envelope on which I had noted down all the puzzles and clues from my session on Xbox360 on the week it released (one or two apartments ago). I’ll try to share it here if I find it.
Fez was one of the first indie games I played (or at least paid money for – I had played Cave Story already at that point), and it‘s still representative of the “indie dream” for me. I vaguely remember @Video_Game_King or someone else making an argument that indies are all stuck in the limits of iterating on what big corporate developers were doing 10-15 years earlier, and I guess Fez was instrumental in establishing that mindset – but I feel it’s hard to fault it, with how ambitious it was in the way it dug up ideas about the nexus between 2D and 3D from the late-SNES early-PS1 era, and so successfully did something new and different with them, going way beyond what was necessary.
Even now nearly ten years later I can still clearly imagine the layouts of particular islands and imagine the blocks bobbing up and down or the butterflies fluttering around. I don't know if this is just because I played it at the right time in my personal development, if the levels were designed spectacularly well, if there's something about the 2D/3D mechanic that makes things more tangible and "real" feeling than they would be in a purely 2D or purely 3D game, or some combination of all of these.
