For this week’s critical play, I played Fez, a single-player puzzle-platformer developed by Polytron Corporation and published by Trapdoor in 2012. I played on MacOS through Steam, though the game is also available on Windows, Xbox, Switch, and PlayStation. Fez’s target audience is people who love deep, intricate puzzles. While Fez’s puzzle mechanics of rotation, platforming, and open-world exploration successfully create the aesthetic of discovery and challenge, they also create the dynamics of excessive backtracking and unclear progression that detract from players’ psychological need for achievement and feelings of competence.
Fez is a game about depth, both literally, logically, and narratively. The game opens as a simple 2D platformer in which the player plays as Gomez, a character traversing a layered village. However, Gomez soon encounters a magical golden cube which literally adds a layer of depth, transforming the 2D world into a rotatable 3D space. Through rotating the world, the player can reveal hidden pathways and access previously unreachable areas. This mechanic is central to the game’s key objective: finding the parts of the golden cube, which are hidden and scattered throughout the world.
Through its rotation mechanic, Fez creates alternate interface puzzles where players must use spatial logic to deduce the correct path. Similar to Monument Valley, perspective shifts what areas and platforms the player can see and traverse. For example, in the room shown below, only after rotating can one discover and enter an entirely separate room that is not visible at first.
These puzzles strongly appeal to the Achievers and Explorers of Bartle’s Taxonomy. Achievers can gain satisfaction through solving difficult spatial puzzles and collecting cubes which visibly track progress. Explorers are rewarded by experimenting with perspective to discover clever mechanism that solve puzzles. Together, these emerging dynamics help create the aesthetic of fun through discovery and challenge.
This is aided by how puzzles feel natural to the environment, emerging directly from the landscape. Architecture creates the puzzle and level design guides exploration. This creates fun through discovery as by solving puzzles, the player explores the world around them.
However, later in the game, Fez complicates these spatial logic puzzles by layering platforming challenges on top. Rotating and launching platforms force precise timing from the player to progress, without additional logical difficulty. Combined with unclear spatial relationships, when a player fails a puzzle, the cause of this failure is ambiguous. It’s unclear whether the failure occurred because of incorrect logical reasoning or because of lack of platforming ability. For example, in the puzzle below, I struggled from almost half an hour as I couldn’t determine whether I was making a logical error or simply wasn’t timing my jumps right.
This undermines the players feeling of competence, and thus motivation as per Self-Determination Theory. If they struggle at either of the two necessary mechanics, they do not know which they can practice with to improve. Additionally, it detracts from the ideal “V-8” response as it doesn’t feel as satisfying to solve a puzzle if one was misled in what was needed to solve it.
Furthermore, while discovery is a central aesthetic, the lack of navigational checkpoints adds tedious backtracking which isolates Achievers. Although the world map (shown below) clearly displays unexplored areas, players cannot directly travel between them. In order to reach a previous level, the player must re-solve all of the puzzles in reverse and manually backtrack to discover hidden secrets. While Explorers may derive joy from reexamining the world, Achievers may find this mechanic frustrating. Solving a puzzle for a second time does not fulfill the player’s psychological need for achievement as the main difficulty of the puzzle–figuring out what to do–has already been achieved.
Furthermore, it increases the distance between certain puzzles and solutions. Certain puzzles can only solved if previous levels have been fully completed (see the keys mechanic below), forcing backtracking in order to progress.
This focus on deep discovery also extends to the storyline. While players can easily interact with NPCs, the storyline discovered here is very surface-level. Instead, the main embedded narrative is hidden behind additional encryption based puzzles. While Explorers may appreciate this depth, other players may feel alienated as the true narrative is largely inaccessible.
Fez demonstrates how while some puzzle mechanics create fun, leaning too far in one direction can alienate players. Through its strong rotation mechanic and environmental puzzle design, Fez creates fun through discovery and challenge. Yet the combination of difficult platforming and navigational issues adds tediousness that undermines competence and achievement. Ultimately, Fez succeeds in creating a complex world to discover but in doing so, sacrifices clarity and player guidance.
One accessibility issue Fez does not address is gameplay for players with motion sickness. Players have mentioned in several online forums how Fez’s constant rotation with a lack of consistent perspective can induce motion sickness. Unfortunately, Fez does not provide options for reducing this rotation (although the rotation itself is not entirely necessary for gameplay) and even includes mechanics that force rotation without player input and unskippable rotating cutscenes. Although the rotation is a core part of the gameplay, the developers could have added features to improve the experience for more players.
