Fez, Part 2

For reasons I'm not entirely sure of, I'm putting this in a separate post. I've almost completely finished Fez, though I'm still a bit shy of the ending for reasons that I'll explain later. I feel that I needed to write some sort of follow-up post to my previous entry, in which I pretty much ripped Fez to shreds. The post was incredibly unfair, as I based most of my opinions on my tired, unpleasant experience with the first ending in the game. If I had been truly professional about the experience, I would have played the game through to the end in order to take in the full meaning of not only that ending, but the post-game that followed. For that, I apologize for my horrible reporting the first time around.

Note that I'm not wholly redacting my first post though. Certain elements of my opinion still stand. The game is based on a mechanic that, between the time of announcement and release, has been duplicated by other games, and isn't used to the extent that it probably could have been used here. I was asked by a friend if my experience would have been changed if there weren't a five-year waiting period between announcement and release. I responded that the mechanic, no matter how you slice it, still gets old quickly, but without the time for copycats to come along and steal my attention, it might've held my interest for a little bit longer.

What's changed between my first posting and now? I have since chosen that "New Game +" mode, and I'm satisfied to note that it's a continuation of the first game that happens to start very similarly to the opening scenes the first time you play, but with a certain extra element given to your character allowing new puzzles to be unlocked (I'm trying to avoid spoilers this time). Those spoilers held my interest for a while, but eventually you realize that there are only so many new puzzles added; they're just repeated several times in different ways or places. For example (and I don't think this is too much of a spoiler), on one island with a clock tower, there are four bonus cubes that can be unlocked, allegedly on the schedule with one appearing once every minute, one once every hour, one once every day, and one appearing once every week. That's what I'm stuck on now. I have about two more days to wait to grab that last cube, that final cube that will let me finally finish the game with a proper ending. So yes, there's also an element of frustration that comes with some of the puzzles' designs.

So where does that leave me? I'm going to stick by the opinion I posted last time, and that's that you should try the demo and see how you feel about the game.