Flip back through the GameFAQs archives and you’ll find over a thousand solutions and theories to Fez’s puzzles. Watch as hundreds of players discuss and eventually realize how cryptic Phil Fish’s 5-year project really is. What’s available there is only a snapshot of the internet-wide race to complete, and ultimately, understand what Fez is.
And I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the colorful, pseudo-2D, indie platformer with a neat twist that we thought it was. It’s a study on teamwork and the power of physically separate individuals in a digitally connected world.
For games, this kind of cooperation means walkthroughs, glitch exploits, and cheats. But with Fez, people truly wanted to understand, to decipher what exactly was going on.
Playing Fez during this time made you feel like a part of a larger team parsing through its puzzles. Every day, you’d check the forum threads and Twitter to monitor the progress. Every day, we inched closer to unraveling Fez’s ultimate secret.
But the true secret was scribbled onto our notepads, and carved into the message boards. It was the way we talked about Fez, and the compulsive nature to complete it.
For someone outside of this bubble, it all looked like madness.
It’s that madness that makes Fez unique.
We didn’t solve Fez, so much as it solved us.
Fez is a product of our time. Fez is 2012.
“The monolith was solved, guys.
Some people just brute forced the answer instead of actually figuring it out.
What a joke.” – HermanTuttle
Read our review of Fez.
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