This Week In Retro: Fez (Patreon)

April 13, 2012: Fezzes are cool

by Diamond Feit

We lost a legend this week: Gilbert Gottfried, professional loudmouth, passed away at the age of 67. The Brooklyn native started performing stand-up comedy as a teenager in the 1970s, so from the moment I came into this world, he was on stage somewhere making people laugh—or not, as the case may be, for Gilbert's material and persona were both one-of-a-kind.

Over his 50+ years in the business, GIlbert Gottfried's jokes ran the gamut from the tamest observations to the crudest possible fantasies, but he delivered every single one of them in a shrill (at times shrieking) voice, all while hunching his shoulders and squinting at the floor. An unsuspecting viewer could easily mistake a Gilbert Gottfried performance for a deranged man ranting at the local bus depot, an easy slip-up when you learn that Gilbert often relied on public transportation rather than driving or flying himself around the country.

With his distinctive tenor and appearance, Gilbert made his way from comedy clubs to Hollywood, never as a star but as a scene-stealing supporting player. Before long, he put his unique delivery to work in the world of voice acting. His most famous, longest-running role was that of Iago the parrot in Disney's Aladdin, its sequels, and subsequent projects such as the Kingdom Hearts series. There's little to suggest Gilbert Gottfried ever became much of a video game fan, but he recreated some of the medium's most famous lines for Game Informer, and later appeared in an Angry Video Game Nerd skit in 2019. In the recent documentary Gilbert, his children are shown with controllers in their hands, so it's quite possible they have heard their father shout at them from their PlayStation.

Gilbert Gottfried may not have had much to do with video games specifically, but he wasn't the type to turn down a check, so forgive me for dreaming of interactive roles he never took but could have made his own. In particular, there's a game Gilbert would have been perfect for which turned 10 years old on the very same day I learned of his passing: 2012's Fez, a colorful yet serene platform adventure about a tiny fellow exploring an extra-dimensional world.

Fez stars Gomez, a cute-as-a-button mushroom-like humanoid who lives in harmony with his fellow creatures. He begins the game in bed, wakes, then steps out of his front door to news that he is needed for a special event. He climbs to the top of his rural residential tower to receive a fabulous fez which immediately grants him the power to rotate the world on its z-axis, turning his pixel-perfect universe into a voxel wonderland with perspectives never before seen. In discovering this power, he also shatters a giant talking cube and must set out to retrieve the pieces before all of reality collapses.

Gomez's quest to retrieve all the lost cube fragments and rescue existence is the entirety of Fez's gameplay; there is no antagonist to unseat and no combat of any kind. Falling from too great a height is "fatal" but Gomez immediately revives in his last stable location, so players need not fear any consequences for making an errant leap or failing to grab a ledge. As designer Phil Fish once said, Fez is a "stop and smell the flowers" kind of game, an intentionally non-violent, stress-free experience.

With its only goal being exploration and collecting baubles, Fez is a difficult game to quantify. Technically it’s a “puzzle platformer” like Braid or The Pedestrian, but in this case, the puzzles and the platforming are two separate things. Figuring out how to navigate each space by rotating the world to uncover new paths or doorways is the primary challenge of Fez, plus the occasional locked door. Collecting cubes and small keys opens new paths which lead to more spaces.

Fez’s puzzles are more literal than figurative, with coded messages and incomplete maps scattered throughout the world for the player to discover and decipher. Some of these brain-teasers require note taking or even decryption techniques, and at least one embeds its solution in a QR code which was quite novel at the time (I only got my first smartphone six months earlier).

Fez is a single-player game but the depth of its puzzles transformed it into an asynchronous communal experience that lasted all summer long. I vividly recall friends sharing ideas and asking questions about the game on social media for months, posting photos of scrap paper covered in symbols as they tried to solve every hidden mystery. A decade later, all the solutions are now collected online for the world to see, but not every puzzle has been “solved” in the truest sense.

One of Fez's most infamous curiosities is what appears to be an empty chamber. Carefully examining the floor (via a first-person gaze ability only unlocked after clearing the game once) reveals a pattern that corresponds to a partially-legible treasure map found elsewhere in the game. Standing in the right spot and entering a series of controller inputs spawns a floating black monolith. Standing in yet another spot and pressing a different string of buttons transforms the monolith into a rare collectible. We know the exact code to clear this room because fans collectively brute-forced an answer, but the actual method of figuring out how players were supposed to learn the solution remains unknown to this day.

Perfectly complimenting the hi-res-yet-retro aesthetic of Fez is its soundtrack, a synth-heavy chiptune masterpiece by Disasterpeace. For a low-stakes game that's heavy on contemplation and experimentation, the music invites players to relax and enjoy their time as Gomez. The score capably augments the world of Fez by oscillating between peaceful and powerful, melodic and menacing, while also taking timely breaks to allow the gentle sounds of nature to stand alone. I just so happened to play Fez for the first time while still in the process of discovering the long-running science-fiction series Doctor Who, and I felt the game's background tunes were very evocative of that show's otherworldly soundscape in the 1970s and 1980s.

Fez first appeared as an Xbox LIVE Arcade exclusive in 2012 after a long development process; the game was initially announced in 2007 and missed more than one planned release date, which garnered it a significant amount of hype for an indie title. Once it finally came out, however, both critics and audiences immediately embraced it. Fez appeared on multiple Game of the Year lists for 2012 and as of this writing, Metacritic ranks it as the 66th highest-scoring Xbox 360 game of all time (just two slots lower than the original Dark Souls).

With this much cachet, Fez went multi-platform in the years that followed, debuting on home computers in 2013, all available Sony PlayStation consoles in 2014 (including Vita), iOS in 2017, and the Nintendo Switch in 2021. Its enduring popularity is a testament to its timelessness; Fez looked and sounded "retro" in 2012 so it hasn't aged a day in a decade. Revisiting it for this column (and remembering next to nothing regarding its deepest secrets), I was impressed by its controls, its graphics, and its music all over again. Fez is a hard game to put down, as there's always one more cube or unopened doorway just out of Gomez's reach, a perpetual carrot on a stick tempting players to keep going.

The only thing missing from Fez is Fez II, a sequel which was announced in 2013 only to be quickly (and publicly) canceled on social media. The face of developer Polytron, designer Phil Fish, is a famously mercurial personality, an outspoken creative person who often made headlines for speaking his mind. In a recent interview commemorating 10 years of Fez, Phil Fish told Eurogamer, "The plan was always to make a game that you'd talk about in the schoolyard or around the water cooler. Like I did with Zelda when I was a kid. The sort of game that would lend itself to weird urban legends and wild theories." He also alluded to the game's persisting mysteriousness, saying "last time I checked, there were still a couple of things that had yet to be truly elucidated." When asked about the possibility of resurrecting Fez II, he explained "I just need 200 million dollars and 5000 developers for 15 years to bring my grandiose vision to life."

A decade of Fez and the unfortunate absence of Fez II has done little to deflate my passion for the original game. I've played through it on multiple platforms since it first came out and the soundtrack maintains a regular presence on all my digital music devices. While Fez's specific dimension-shifting gameplay remains unique, I can see its influence on the indie games community as a whole in the many events I have attended. Good pixel art and chiptune melodies will always find an audience.

Speaking of audiences, let's go back to the recently departed Gilbert Gottfried and why I wish he had played a part in Fez. The game doesn't have any spoken dialogue, but there are plenty of word bubbles, though Gomez never has anything to say. Instead, Gilbert could have voiced Dot, the floating tesseract that briefs Gomez on what's happening and directs him on his quest. As a small assistant who flies around, it's very much an Iago-type role to play, so it would have been right in Gilbert's wheelhouse. At the very least, when Gomez accidentally spins the world too fast and breaks the giant talking cube that gave him his fez, Gilbert could have summed up Gomez's mistake in two words: "YOU FOOL!"

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.