izigame.me

Long but thorough review of why I dislike this game.
First off, Fez is a platform-puzzler, but it primarily platforms, with the puzzles being... less than desirable.
First, the platforming. This is where the game almost shines. The concept of switching perspectives is uncommon, and allows for some potentially unique platforming. Unfortunately, the majority of the platforming content is the same copy-and-paste style with little variety. Far too many segments involve simply alternating a series of jumping onto a small platform and then changing perspective, rinse and repeat. The perspective shift concept is very underdeveloped in general, I feel.
Additionally, nearly every single area is void of unique ideas. Almost every area is a vertical tower/cliff/some sort of climb, with essentially no horizontal platforming levels. There are also no enemies, and very few obstacles outside of gravity. There are a few mechanics, such as bombs to blow up breakable walls, boxes to put on switches, and levers to rotate for various reasons, however the problem is that these mechanics are criminally underused, and virtually never appear outside their respective small regions. They introduce an idea, play it straight with little variation, and then it just never comes back anywhere else in the game. It's just gimmicks that aren't fleshed out at all.
Now let's talk about Blackholes. These are areas of space that "kill" you (you respawn on the last safe ground touched). Now, although a small few are fixed and always appear, the majority of the Blackholes either appear or not based on the whims of RNG. An island can either be covered in Blackholes or not, with the Blackholes appearing the same fixed position each time they spawn. Essentially what this means is that sometimes, the platforming challenges on some islands will be slightly more annoying and tedious than normal. This is a terrible, and adds nothing to the game. It just wastes time when you have to backtrack dozens of times.
Now, one controversial topic is the inclusion of fall damage. That is to say, if you fall too far, you'll "die" and re-spawn back where you fell. I actually think this is a good mechanic because it ensures that when you inevitably fall, you don't lose your progress climbing whichever endless upwards climb you're on. Now, the downside is that, if you have to go downwards, which isn't uncommon in this game, it's a complete pain. You can grab vines/other grab-able walls to stop your fall, but only if you haven't fallen too far. If you do fall far enough, you lose all control and become helpless. I believe falling into water stops your fall safely, but this is never especially relevant in game due to water only appearing in the Ocean ("Natural region") area. If there was a mechanic to let you fall easier when you wanted to, in a controlled manner, then this would be fine, but as it stands I found myself rather annoyed about having to take the slow way down every time.
So then, what is your objective? The objective is to collect all of the cube pieces. There are 32 Gold Cubes and 32 Anti-Cubes. The Gold Cubes are either found as a whole piece, or further split into 8 small pieces. The Gold Cubes are obtained from platforming and the partial pieces are scattered just about everywhere requiring you to check every nook and cranny in every perspective on every island. But honestly, that's not so bad. The Anti-Cubes, however, are generally obtained from solving "puzzles", and are much slower to obtain.
Now, let's talk about the puzzle aspect.
This game pretends to be a puzzle game, but the majority of the puzzles are very disappointing and don't actually require solving anything. You simply know what to do, and then spend most of your time just executing the solution, rather than solving for it.
To begin, let's discuss the cryptography puzzles. It should be no surprise that this game includes it's own fictional "language" and number system. I say "language", because it's just English written in a cipher. There is a lot of text written in this language, which is called Zuish. Fortunately, despite what many people say, you do not need to decode any text in this game to get the true ending. It helps for lore possibly, and is needed for some Easter Eggs in the endgame, but for the main game it's not required. It's not hard to translate the text once you know the cipher, but it's very tedious to translate it one letter at a time, as there is no auto-translation feature at all. As for learning the cipher, you can either crack it through normal cryptography, or find the one room in the game that supposedly acts as a "Rosetta Stone". Unfortunately, this Rosetta Stone is in English only, so if you aren't a native English speaker, you very well may be out of luck, despite this game boasting to support many other languages.
Now, the number system is a lot more interesting, and is one of the parts that I actually really enjoyed. I've never seen this particular number system before, and it's taught in a very clear, yet puzzling way. Learning the number system is required to get all of the Anti-Cubes,.
Lastly, there is a third type of code system, which involves encoding a "password" so to speak. This is also taught well by the game (although by chance, it unfortunately happened to be the very last area of the game I went to, due to the game's extreme open-endedness). However, the good ends there. Once you know how to decode the passwords, it's very repetitive. The game spams this password system and it stops being a puzzle the instant you know how it works, which makes about a third of the Anti-Cubes completely trivial. And that's not even considering the very irritating backtracking, as the game decides that half of these password should be locked, for no reason, behind the first ending.
Now, there is another type of collectable, the Maps. These are maps of certain rooms that mark points of interest. The puzzle is twofold, both finding the room and then solving what you need to do with them. The maps aren't particularly hard, but they are a nice addition that varies the gameplay, and some of them are actually quite unique.
Other bad puzzles include a "puzzle" of simply waiting for the right time (or changing your computer's clock instead of waiting for the entire week to pass), the "puzzle" of "Do you have a QR scanner?", and a series of "puzzles" where you'd better have stereo audio instead of mono, and you have no way of knowing that you need stereo audio if you don't have it.
But one of the biggest offenders of the puzzle system is that there are some Anti-Cubes that are just... duplicates. Multiple unrelated puzzles can give you the same Anti-Cube, in a sort of "you only need to solve one of these". This is awful. Normally, the world map keeps track of unsolved puzzles. But let's suppose you solve puzzle A that gives the same Anti-Cube as puzzle B. The game will claim that both puzzles are solved on the world map, even though you never solved puzzle B and you won't know why it's suddenly no longer tracked on the map. Also, sometimes they aren't even tracked on the world map, and you just have bits and pieces of puzzle B that you can never solve because you got the reward for it from something else and have no way of knowing.
And the biggest issue I had was where the world map erroneously claimed that a puzzle that didn't have an alternate reward, and that I didn't solve, was allegedly solved. This was the last Anti-Cube I got, and only after going through a list of every one on the wiki.
This game has many more flaws, such as the endings being nonsensical seizure-inducing fever dreams that explain nothing nor provide any closure, and the game's mascot companion named Dot being literally useless in every case, except one specific out of place dialog from them, but I'm out of text space in this review.
Overall, this game felt like it just wanted to waste my time.