In your opinion, is there anything in common between the release calendars of high-quality action games in the Wild West setting and exciting, innovative platformers?? Strangely enough, there is a similarity. The arrival of both of them on consoles and PCs is reminiscent of rain in the desert: thunder will strike, a golden, cool downpour will pour in – and again deathly silence will hang in the air. This year has turned out just like that, “rainy”. While only the first guest rode up from the hot Wild West on a lathered mustang, the platformers were already lined up in a two-dimensional world: here is the philosophical Braid, and the dizzying And Yet It Moves, and the magical Trine – and this is not the whole list. And keeping up with them, amusingly mincing with his pixelated legs, is another ambitious brother of the moderately well-fed Mario – Fez.

“Everything ingenious is simple”

Despite the fact that the sluggish project has still not reached its own release, Fez has already earned a prize at IGF 2008 for achievement in the field of visual design. And there really is something to see here. The game already looks extremely stylish. At first, when you briefly watch the first videos, it may seem that this is an ordinary platformer. But look a little closer, and you begin to understand that this is by no means just another clone Super Mario Bros. for nostalgic fans.

Fez immediately captivates. From https://nongamstopcasinosites.co.uk/review/magic-win/ the first screenshots, from the first short gameplay videos. A quiet melody begins to play. This is a reference stylization of the sounds of eight-bit consoles with almost imperceptible inclusions of modern electronic motifs. At the same time the music Fez – not only a series of “squeaks” that form a melody, but behind the unsightly sound shell hides the soul, the mood of the composition. The developers, without a single untidy joint, put together the past and present of electronic music and cemented it all with the strong cement of talent.

Meanwhile, while we were enjoying the pleasant music, the most important part of the video began – a demonstration of the gameplay. Although the main trump card is still hidden in the sleeve Fez, I’m already amazed by the visuals. He, like the music, turns out to be a wonderful combination of old school and modern achievements. Despite the deliberate angularity, the predominance of straight lines, the picture is alive. It is difficult to explain how, with such primitive, at first glance, visual means at their disposal (perfect geometric shapes all around), the developers created such a harmonious composition. Maybe it’s the impeccable color scheme or attention to detail… But the locations in almost complete 2D (oops, the ace almost fell out of my sleeve) are filled to the brim with freshness, bright colors, and cheerfulness. Even three dimensional Pure, perhaps did not convey the feeling of purity and happiness as well as it succeeds Fez.

Adventure in the land of 3D pixels

The gameplay is also enjoyable. The same trump card mentioned above – the ability to rotate the world around its own axis. How it happens? Imagine that you are playing a platformer in which each pixel is three-dimensional and is not a flat square, but a cube. In a word, the characters are two-dimensional, but the world is made in 3D and seems to be strung on an invisible axis, like a popsicle on a stick. We can rotate locations around this very axis (there are no up-and-down turns: this fun is already present in And Yet It Moves).

But there is one subtlety – in a two-dimensional world, objects cannot be closer or further: they are all in the same plane. It turns out that if you suddenly want to jump onto a platform in the distance, all you need to do is turn the world around and climb onto this island. It turns out very interesting: a piece of land is in the same plane as us, but in 3D it is completely in the other direction. But we remember: in two-dimensional space there is no perspective! Whatever one may say, the world will remain in 2D, and we are only traveling along the faces of a cube. This is how we will have to, in order to move up the level, rotate the world in order to “install” another platform, find another ledge. And then a funny pixel man in a fez named Gomez will continue, under our guidance, to jump on small patches of land. It’s not for nothing that he was given the gift of twisting the world by a grumpy one-eyed old man?

Here, however, the first doubts appear about the interestingness of the game: it turns out to be some kind of Super Mario Bros., in which you need to turn the world to go further. What about puzzles, dynamics, if everything can be solved by simply “bringing through” the edges?? But the developers assure that from location to location we will find ourselves in different situations. Sometimes you have to jump around islands in pitch darkness, almost blindly. It will also be possible to carry objects (for example, dynamite) in your hands to solve puzzles. The gameplay is also diversified by black holes – places in which the matter of space is literally torn apart. Where the fabric of reality diverges, something like a door to space appears, which is mortally dangerous for Gomez and other residents to enter.

Will he disappear into the black hole of an unrealized idea? Fez? The likelihood of this happening is extremely low. Still, the efficiency of indie developers is significantly higher than that of their “money-dependent” colleagues. Given the diversity of platformers released over the past year, Fez promises to be a wonderful addition with its unique design and interesting idea. We look forward to it, Comrade Gomez! General Mario is proud of you!