A-dorable.
Upcoming XBLA mindfuck-platformer and IGF prizewinner Fez is still looking both incredible and incredibly ambitious. To celebrate 2.5 years of development on the title, Polytron has released 26 swear-and-catchphrase-laden screenshots of strange and various problems they’ve encountered over the course of development. Some of them are confusing, some of them are a little bit scary, but almost all of them are interesting, colorful, and pretty cute. Check them out here:
http://polytroncorporation.com/?p=582
In case you’re one of the unfortunate few who hasn’t yet heard Fez, it’s a 2D/3D pixel art platform/puzzler coming in Spring 2010 to Xbox Live Arcade. Here’s the most recent trailer:
The only part about this that is even remotely a bummer is this: while a 3 year development cycle for an indie game can certainly bring a lot of polish (see Braid), it also invites competition to scoop you. In the 2+ years Fez has been in development, both Super Paper Mario on the Wii and especially Crush on the PSP have had a chance to come out and do very similar things to what Fez seems to. Fortunately, Fez seems to have more style than both of those games combined, and that’s very exciting to see.
What do you guys think about Fez? Do other games with similar M. C. Escher-y mechanics take anything away from it, or is it still going to be every bit as awesome as we all hoped? Give your answers down in the comments!
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Is this alone reason enough to get an Xbox 360? It looks amazing. And trixely.
What? Are you high?
When the first Fez trailer came out, Crush and Paper Mario were already released, so when Fez comes out, people will have forgotten those mediocre games. There really is no competition either, since Crush is a PSP game and Paper Mario is for Wii. This will be an XBLA game(and will eventually probably come out on PC as well).
I wasn’t using “competition” literally. My point was that the core of the concept has been seen already, and since games like Crush certainly had much shorter dev cycles and much bigger dev teams than Fez, they were able to put out a product more quickly (albeit less stylishly or solidly) than Polytron can. It’s up to them to carry the concept into a full game, and they appear to be doing a badass job.
But yeah, guilty, I was high when I wrote most of this. Oops!
I can’t wait to get my grubby mits on this one :)
Hopefully having similar games will only prevent Fez from seeming gimmicky but rather an improvement/refinement of the idea. Either way Nick is clearly high though (clearly).