If you have been completly unaware of this game, it made quite a splash last year, previously winning the "Excellence in Visual Art" award at the Independent Games Festival in 2008 and was kind of a belle of a bal of PAX Prime 2011.
A long screenshot of FEZ, sporting a cure owl structure
(for more about owl head movement, click here)
Not only is the game visually stunning, utilizing strong pixel art art direction and hauntingly beautiful audio, it also features a fresh and interesting sense of false perspective.
In this trailer, you can grasp the game mechanic that FEZ is trying to utilize, by rotating what would otherwise be standard 2D platformer, you can actually bend the laws of space and travel to the points that are far from your original position before the screen rotation.
Now, the game is all good, but let's focus on the impossible spaces mentioned earlier. The humans have actually been obssesing with optical illusions for quite some time, most of us are familiar with the netherland graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher.
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| Escher's Waterfall |
An accomplished psyachiatrist, he also gave us many new ideas on chess theory, mathematics and genetics. His son, Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS, is a well known English mathematical physicist. Of his many bright papers and published works, The Emperor's New Mind is the most stunning one.
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| Penrose stairs - example of impossible object |
Games like Portal are all well, but they just teach the player to think about in space that can be traversed and bent. FEZ on the other hand teaches us to overestimate space, to make the space an idea that can be worked and manipulate. It doesn't matter that the game is simplistic and indie. On the contrary, it has allowed the producer to create a spectacular piece of gaming technology, one that I hope will be connected to a bright storyline and engaging gaming mechanics of spacewarping platforming.
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| Fez releases on Xbox 360 April 13, 2012 |
