Fez: Seriously, it’s not just about the hat.

Polytron’s new independently developed game, Fez, which released on Xbox Arcade April 13th 2012, is coming to PC, May 1st, 2013. Two days!  It’s also in production for Mac OSX and Linux. It’ll be made available on two distribution platforms: Steam and GOG.com

 It’s about darn time, for those who’ve been following the game for a while. Fez began production by Polytron developers Phil Fish and Renaud Bédard. They make Army of Two seem like a kid’s game for all the work they stuck into Fez.

Fez has its own original soundtrack, mostly performed by Disasterpeace. Fez has also received top notch marks–its lowest score is 4/5 by G4 and 8/10 by GameSpot. It’s bloody rare to see such wide approval – well worth the wait.

Fez has also won the Excellence in Visual Art award at the Independent Games Festival, and it was also nominated for the “Design Innovation” award. At Pax Prime 2011, where it first displayed, it was one of the PAX 10 and won two awards; Story+World Design and Grand Jury. It has also won the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival, and been declared 2012 Eurogamer’s Game of the Year.

They are noted for being one of the three games casted in “Indie Game: The Movie.” During their time filming, they suffer through Development Hell. Fez began production in 2007, and it took four years for the team of two to present at PAX: 2011. It received a warm welcome despite the few occasional hiccups and freezes accompanying the game, and mid-2012, it launched on the Xbox Live Arcade. In two days, keyboard and mouse lovers, prepare to rejoice!

What’s it all about?

Fez is about Gomez, a strange distended fellow, living in a two dimensional puzzle/platform game world. On one particular day, Gomez is out and about in his world and finds an odd item: the “Hexahedron.” The Hexahedron gives him a magical fez hat that allows Gomez to perceive the world in a new three dimension. Gomez figures this is pretty cool, and he begins to explore; and then the Hexahedron explodes! Gomez wakes up after the explosion to find his world has restarted. An, albeit random, hypercube explains he must collect the shards of the Hexahedron in order to maintain the integrity of his world, and thus where Gomez adventures into his new 2D yet 3D world begin.

What sets it apart?

What makes Fez awesome, and what makes it stand out from the rest is that depth is not a factor in the game. This blew my mind. Brains scattered on my monitor level: blown. Gomez can shift his world by ninety degrees at any time, relative to the screen. This change in perspectives means that strange block in the back of the screen can suddenly shift to the foreground and make a path across the screen – but when Gomez walks the block and shifts the screen again, it’s shown that Gomez has traveled an impossibly long distance. It’s a great visual trick that makes this puzzle platformer truly different, and mind-bending.