News Fez hits 1 million sales

Indie darling Fez has sold 1,000,000 copies.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2013/12/10/fez-hits-1-million-sales/1

 

Well congrats Phil, you may not be cut out for the gaming industry but you made a great game.

 

I just beat the game yesterday, and am at 198% completion. I have 3 more blue cubes, I can get to that last door, and then I'll be done.

I admittedly looked up the answers to a few things. Some of them I could have figured out myself but I don't really have the patience to translate them all and try every combination. The telescope room was probably the most irritating.

 

Loved Fez when I tried it earlier in the year. It's one of the few games I've played long into the night. It's one of the even fewer games I've invested a whole weekend into. It's one of the very few games I've finished to full completion. What's weird about all this is that there's no real story, no enemies, and no real danger, so it's hard to say why it was so compelling.

Perhaps it was nostalgia for the platformers of my early gaming days (the game is one long love letter to the 8-bit era), or the spot-on controls, or the puzzles and secrets that made you feel like a genius for working them out.

A lot of it was down t the sound design, Disasterpeace did a great job of adding atmosphere to the game, as seen here in my favourite level:

 

To me, it was opening a door to a whole new undiscovered area, only to find it keeps branching out into more places. There was just so much variety. It was all blocky, but it still strangely felt very natural. The game is also just about as un-linear as you can get - something very rare throughout gaming history.

What I think is weird is most of the things people didn't like about the game, I had no problem with, but where I felt the game fell short, other people enjoyed. For example, I personally don't find it very difficult to navigate, but, some areas are a little TOO easy to navigate. The sewer area was probably the most challenging to navigate. I don't necessarily fault the devs for this, because you have to make the game somewhat balanced when you consider how un-linear it is. I also didn't like how they didn't take enough advantage of the game being half 2D half 3D. I really liked some of the creativity they put into it but there were too many rooms that had no interesting use of being rotated.

I suppose my greatest complaint were some of the blue cube puzzles. I never bothered decrypting the message or pattern for a lot of them because I found them a little tedious, mainly due to the inconsistencies. So I just looked them up. But after a while, you get to realize that's maybe 1/5 of the entire game, so that's probably why I felt there were too many uninteresting rooms.

I think it'd be cool if there was an "experts expansion" where they release levels that are extra hard to figure out and navigate. The current release of Fez was dumbed down considerably so it could appeal to the average person.