Puzzles, for a certain kind of person, are a fun but maddening exercise, especially insanely complicated ones. And there’s nothing puzzle designers like doing more than torturing their fans with puzzles that go beyond the range of complex and into the ridiculous.
Like “Fez,” and its floating black monolith.
“Fez” is a puzzle game designed by Polytron that’s available on XBox Live. The basic gameplay is a mix of 2D and 3D, crossed with optical illusions — the game spends a lot of time messing with your head, starting with the fact that you can “complete” more than 200% of the game.
What drove gamers particularly crazy, though, was the giant freaking black monolith that’s the last puzzle in the game. It turns out to involve a whole bunch of elaborate stunts, the climax of which is converting a 2D book you find earlier on into a 3D version of it. On paper.
Ars Technica has the whole saga, and it’s pretty interesting if for no other reason than it shows how far game designers will go to torment their fans, and how far fans will go to solve a puzzle. And give “Fez” a shot, if you can: it’ll mess with your head, but it’s incredibly rewarding when you solve a stumper of a puzzle.
(Image courtesy Polytron)