Folklore and mythology are things that permeate every facet of human culture, even down to the level of something as nerdy as video games. For pretty much as long as the medium has existed, there's been a big undercurrent of theories or strange rumors surrounding games, which really expands the mind on the potential of the medium (I think most people who played games as a child here can attest to this sort of feeling of an endless, limitless world being accessed everytime you booted a game up.)

This is all relevant to FEZ, because it seeks to encapsulate that exact feeling. This is a claim many other games have also made, and I'm sure people will point to many others which also try to do this exact same thing. There's a big separation between them and FEZ though; FEZ is completely committed to this sentiment, to the degree of pushing away (what would be) the vast majority of its audience. The vast majority of content in this game will go unnoticed and unrecognized by 90% of the people who play it, and it will basically only remain a basic collectathon in their eyes. The truth at hand though, is that FEZ in actuality is one of the most esoteric, complex and creative games ever made.

There's dozens and dozens of puzzles here, and while some are repeated, there's an overwhelming amount of passion and thought put into each that break down the nature of what a puzzle can (and should) actually be. On the surface, most players will go through FEZ breezing through it and engaging with extremely simplistic puzzles that are in each room while exploring, but the reality is that most of these rooms are multifaceted and have multiple puzzles in them, with some of them being apart of grander ciphers that stretch across the whole game, and others varying between being bizarre riddles or being meta-puzzles that require interaction with the actual system you're playing on. All of this is arguably gimmicky, and it gets even more so when the game stoops into the final frontier where it effectively turns into a straight up alternate reality game, which is also arguably pretentious in its own right, but I don't think knocking it down like that is fair.

FEZ really wants to capture your imagination, and wants you to feel an unresolved sense of mystery, as if you never grew up and didn't realize the sense of unknowable grandeur was mostly an illusion. Amongst one of the puzzles, one is deliberately unsolvable and absolutely requires outside knowledge to solve. Bullshit design? Maybe to some, but it feeds into the mythology, and I go back to where I started. FEZ is the only game where you'd actually have to go run around in a circle 50 times and input the Konami code to unlock something new, just like the rumors of old. Inputting codes, discovering all the oddities of the game and finding out there's so much under the surface of a game that just appears to be a simple platformer collectathon creates an incomparable sense of mystique. The game is a tribute to mythology and our love for the unknown as a whole through and through, and it's well-read; whether that's folklore inside of the medium it's made within, or in regards to the rest of the world with little nods everywhere to actual occultism and the paranormal. What you get at the end is a deeply passionate, thought-provoking and innovative game that breaks the barrier on what puzzles can be, and reinvigorates a sense of mystery within the medium. You'd be fair to call it pretentious, and I wouldn't disagree, and I think there's tons of valid complaints to be said (although I don't necessarily agree) about the platforming earlier on in the game being dull, or even claims to be made that the game overutilizes some puzzles and underutilizes potential for others (seriously, no puzzle about going out of bounds in a game like this? come on Phil) but if you're the type of person who finds any of the ideas here interesting (like me) you'll probably find FEZ to be one of the greatest games ever made; at least, I do. Damn Phil Fish to an eternity of suffering for cancelling FEZ II, and that other unknown project we didn't know about, and the other one, and the other one.