Fez

I've had an insane day, rushing around from thing to thing, pausing only to question why I've got so much on today. One of these things was an appointment with a careers councillor/psychologist (because I'm looking at how to make the most money in life/am insane). I got there half an hour early, which gave me a chance to swing by my old house. And by my old house I mean I moved out of there like 11 years ago. Nothing is left of it now but the block of land it once sat on. Someone has since knocked it down and built a ridiculously modern looking square thing in its place, which makes sense because it was falling apart even in 1996 when we first moved in. Oh the memories...

Christmases...

After-school ABC kids marathons...

Hey Arthur...

The backyard with that fucking pineapple-shaped tree that would give you a splinter about thirty centimetres long if you so much as brushed it...

Anyway screw that let's talk about Fez!

Fez is the greatest video game I have never played. I would love to, but I'm waiting for it to come out on a different platform since I don't feel like getting Xbox live just for this (I don't play many games). But this is just my kind of thing. You play as that jolly white thing above, whose name is Gomez. He lives in a two-dimensional world pretty much identical to your standard side-scrolling game (Mario etc), only here all that changes when a mysterious cube-god thing gives him a magical fez, allowing him to see an extra dimension in his cute little world. What you now have is an extremely clever mind-fuck of an experience whose gameplay is actually impossible to describe. But I'll give it go anyway.

Basically once Gomez has the fez, the game is still a side-scroller, but now your world is a cube rather than a flat picture with characters waddling from one side to the other. This means you can revolve your world ninety degrees at a time, allowing Gomez to uncover doors which previously would have been hidden. The game also makes use of optical illusions (crazy stairs, thing somehow connected to another thing despite looking like it's in front of that thing etc.). So you can jump from one ledge to another, even if the distance is enormous, just by rotating the world, because doing so will eliminate the distance. You know what, fuck this. Look it up on Youtube.

I've heard this game is full of secrets. What seems like an innocent, child-like, little puzzle game is apparently bursting with subtext and hardcore science fiction. Maybe even a bit of philosophy. I don't really know. But considering how brain-meltingly unusual it is even without scratching below the surface, that wouldn't surprise me at all.

The objective of the game is to find all the missing cubes because....I guess someone lost a bunch of cubes. Doing so involves a lot of puzzle solving. By the time you're done you'll be a vegetable.