We named itGame of the Year, then calleda Game of the Decade seven years later.
It’s one of the indie icons, a mandatory mention whenever you’re talking about them.
Until now, that is, and it’s an interesting place to look back on the game from.
There’s no noise surrounding it now, no drama.
All that hullabaloo, it’s gone.
Now, really, there is only the game.
And what a game.
It’s remarkable how fresh it still feels.
It could have been released this year.
Those blue skies and Mario grass-greens are still dreamily nostalgic.
Those pixel edges are still crisp.
Those dinky cube worlds still appear delicate enough to belong in a gallery somewhere.
Fez still turns heads.
Dozens of hours in, I still marvel at how levels realign themselves.
But these are surface level things, really.
So it begins to bother you - not hold you up, just bother you.
I was a fool.
100 per cent is where Fez really begins.
The breezy progress stops and a harder-earned progression settles in.
I spent hours thinking about that giant bell.
But no solution had appeared.
The bell still stood as it once did, teasingly enigmatic.
I spent just as long peering through the telescope, looking at those tetromino shapes in the sky.
Fez does that a lot, teases you.
It places things you don’t understand around you, challenging you to try and figure them out.
Take those posts with the line of symbols on them.
I’d originally expected the game to simply give me an item that would open them up.
Another game would, I’m sure, but Fez doesn’t.
You could have been turning this problem over in your head for days.
You try it, you hope, and you hold your breath as somethingdifferenthappens.
You’ve done it!
The feeling is as relieving as the puzzle was frustrating.
And another layer of Fez peels away.
And Fez is a world of work.
It’s a world of painstaking detail.
Everything is hand-placed and bespoke.
There’s no sense of chance here.
Every rotation of the world has been thought about, every realignment considered.
To me, creator and game are inseparable here.
And that person is, of course, Phil Fish.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that making Fez nearly broke him.
I wonder where Phil Fish is now and what he’s doing.
I hope his life is calmer.
There have beenrare sightingsbut nothing decisive, nothing that can pin him down.
I wonder whether he realises it’s Fez’s 10th anniversary at all.
But then how can he not?
You do not spend five difficult years making a game only to forget when it came out.
I wonder whether he thinks about making games again one day.
Perhaps he does, perhaps he shows them to one or two people but no one else.
But without others to gauge his success by, what would fuel his fire?
Maybe he has attempted Fez 2, only showed it to no one.
But I doubt it, and for various reasons, I hope he never does.
Fez doesn’t need a sequel - it never did.
Nothing could ever be as vibrantly fresh and surprising a second time around.
And that is Fez, brilliant but damaged, singular and unrepeatable.
A cause for celebration but also for continued concern.
A mandatory mention when you talk about indie games.
What would Phil Fish say about it?
Well, I thought I’d ask him, not that I ever thought he’d answer.
Yet to my surprise, he did, and I’ll publishmy interview with himtomorrow.
