Fez (video game)

Fez
The cover art, drawn with a bright, painterly color palette, shows a cartoonish Gomez hopping between two purple platforms lined with grass. The black, angled Fez logo is in the foreground, and various parts of Fez, including animals, the multicolored guide, a lighthouse, and the sea are shown in the background.
Cover art by Bryan Lee O'Malley
Developer(s)Polytron Corporation
Publisher(s)Trapdoor
Producer(s)
  • Thomas Scott
  • Marie-Christine Bourdua
Designer(s)Phil Fish
Programmer(s)Renaud Bédard
Composer(s)Disasterpeace
Platform(s)Xbox 360, Windows, Linux, OS X, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, iOS, Nintendo Switch
Release
  • Xbox 360
  • April 13, 2012
  • Microsoft Windows
  • May 1, 2013
  • Linux, OS X
  • September 11, 2013
  • PS3, PS4, PS Vita
  • March 25, 2014
  • iOS
  • December 13, 2017
  • Nintendo Switch
  • April 14, 2021
Genre(s)Puzzle-platform
Mode(s)Single-player

Fez is a 2012 indie puzzle-platform game developed by Polytron Corporation and published by Trapdoor. The player-character Gomez receives a fez that reveals his two-dimensional (2D) world to be one of four sides of a three-dimensional (3D) world. The player rotates between these four 2D views to realign platforms and solve puzzles. The objective is to collect cubes and cube fragments to restore order to the universe.

The game was called an "underdog darling of the indie game scene"[1] during its high-profile and protracted five-year development cycle. Fez designer and Polytron founder Phil Fish gained celebrity status for his outspoken public persona and his prominence in the 2012 documentary Indie Game: The Movie, which detailed Fez's final stages of development and Polytron's related legal issues. Fez met critical acclaim upon its April 2012 release for Xbox Live Arcade. The game was ported to other platforms following the expiration of a yearlong exclusivity agreement.

Reviewers commended the game's emphasis on discovery and freedom, but criticized its technical issues, in-game navigation, and endgame backtracking. They likened the game's rotation mechanic to the 2D–3D shifts of Echochrome, Nebulus, Super Paper Mario, and Crush. Fez won awards including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and Eurogamer's 2012 Game of the Year. It had sold one million copies by the end of 2013, and it influenced games such as Monument Valley, Crossy Road, and Secrets of Rætikon. A planned sequel was canceled when Fish abruptly left game development.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Polygon: review was invoked but never defined (see the help page).