Fez!

What made me happy today? Fez!
No, I'm not talking about the type of hat. I'm talking about the indie puzzle/platform game Fez, created by Phil Fish. As I've mentioned in another blog post, Fez is one of the games followed in Indie Game: the movie. At that time, Fez seemed to be stuck in development hell. It finally was released for Xbox in April 2012, and on Steam and GOG in May 2013.
Fez is a very cute, happy game. It's about a little 2-dimensional creature called Gomez. One day, Gomez encounters a magical artifact, and receives a magical fez. The fez allows him to see the third dimension. At this point in the game, I thought I encountered a game-breaking bug, but luckily, that wasn't the case. It was what the game was supposed to do. The game rebooted, and Gomez encounters Dot, a floating hypercube. This hypercube tells him that Gomez has to go and collect all cubes before his world is destroyed.
Fez is a great game. You can really explore all dimensions, and depending on how you are looking at things, certain steps will move closer or further. This takes a bit getting used to, as physics don't work that way. Expect to fall off a few ledges while figuring it all out. No worries though, Gomez will re-appear where he fell from. As the game does not use any lives or the likes, you aren't going to die.
Collecting cubes is a nice challenge, and requires a lot of creative thinking at times. I also love the way Gomez looks when you've managed to make a full cube. He looks utterly happy!
The graphics are amazing, everything is made out of little cubes. The 8-bit graphics give the game a bit of a retro feel :-) Fez has received international acclaim, and has a metacritic metascore of 91.
A sequel was announced in June 2013, but sadly it will never be made. Phil Fish has cancelled the game on July 27th, 2013 as he decided he was done with the gaming industry. A pity, because Fez is a great game and I would have loved to play a sequel!
Happy gaming Sunday!