Fez Review (Elysium)
The best way I can describe FEZ is if Mario Odyssey was a 2D indie game that focused around a different core mechanic than cappy. The main mechanic in this game is changing your perspective (with LB/RB respectively on controllers) to view puzzles & levels in new ways.
By that same virtue, FEZ is of course a collectathon in which the main goal is to (OF COURSE) collect a bunch of items scattered across the various levels of the game - in this case cubes. The levels are varied and diverse with beautiful scenery, music & atmosphere reminiscent to me of games like Minecraft which also came out at a similar time period. It's a very relaxing game overall as you can't actually die or game over and the only annoying levels are way towards the end of the game, meaning the average player probably won't even have to deal with them if they aren't going for 100%.
My only real gripe with the game is that some of the puzzles are extremely obtuse (so obtuse in fact that one of them had the entire FEZ community band together to solve it over many months of trial & error) so I would not recommend going completely blind if you are aiming to collect 100% of what this game has to offer. A lot of them involve hitting certain inputs in the right order to spawn a cube to collect such as 'RBLBRBLBLB' etc which can definitely get annoying for the average player.
To counteract this though, the vast majority of the puzzles are fun & simple and mostly involve exploring the world including all kinds of different levels ranging from spooky graveyards to cyberpunk style towns which is where a lot of my comparison to the 3D Mario games comes from.
Overall i'd give FEZ a solid 8/10 & highly recommend picking it up if you like puzzles, collectathons &/or relaxing games.