Fez is a really really great game. I bought it last Friday on Xbox Live Arcade for 800 Microsoft points.
It's a 2D platformer set in a cube shaped universe.
So you run and jump in a 2D landscape, rotate the landscape through 90 degrees left or right to change the perspective, and see new platforms to jump on, doors to go through and explore, etc.
It's a completely peaceful world, well, almost, apart from the distortion and the universe ripping apart.
There's no killing to do, no monsters after you, no penalty for falling off the bottom of the world and dying.
Just exploring, discovering, sometimes encountering strange monuments and levers for you to work out.
It's all about the feeling. It's a game that captures you by luring you in with sheer curiosity at every point. It rewards you by giving you a world far richer than you thought you'd see, and more curious things to explore.
It's all presented in a retro-style; 16-bit-esque to go with the 2D world.
There are a few different areas of landscape, each with their own style. You witness dawn and dusk every few minutes, and it's all very pretty. There's an atmospheric chiptune soundtrack as well, which I quite like despite being by "Disasterpiece" who made a few albums I got with bundles of games - and none of those I particularly enjoyed.
As you adventure, it populates a map so you know what you've found so far, and what's left to find. It's an enormous map, and it kind of reminds me of the huge and horrendously complicated maps that would take up pages and pages in old magazines back in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Earlier today, I saw some patterns on a stone and a larger stone lit up in tetrominoes depending on which buttons I pressed on the joypad. And I thought to myself "I need to replicate that pattern in these movements, don't I?" followed by "I wonder if I have any graph paper".
Which, oddly enough, was a good feeling. So I came here and wrote this blog post instead. :)
EDIT: I think I should mention... sometimes this game is downright creepy!
