toblix

Fez

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I can understand that, for me the deciphering was a nice sidegame as I found that only the anti-cubes really required any sort of puzzleing out. I actually just beat the game and would be curious to know what is giving you a hard time.

I don't really know! I just hit a wall of not being able to find anything else to do (apart from the ciphers and whatnot, which I want to avoid if at all possible). I think I have like 20 cubes and I've collected all the cube bits from the areas that were marked on the map as containing cube bits, and now I don't know what else I can do. I must be missing a big chunk of levels, but I can't tell where I need to go to find them since the map is useless, and it's not really any fun to wander around aimlessly in the areas I've already cleared.

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I don't really know! I just hit a wall of not being able to find anything else to do (apart from the ciphers and whatnot, which I want to avoid if at all possible). I think I have like 20 cubes and I've collected all the cube bits from the areas that were marked on the map as containing cube bits, and now I don't know what else I can do. I must be missing a big chunk of levels, but I can't tell where I need to go to find them since the map is useless, and it's not really any fun to wander around aimlessly in the areas I've already cleared.

Are you sure you've discovered all the places on the map, the ones that are empty are the ones you haven't found the door to. Should lead you to new areas to explore. At least, it did so for me. I had hit a bit of a wall at one point, but ended up finding a whole new branch of levels to play with, just by searching for some new doors to open.

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Fallng off goes mercifully un-punished, thankfully. As does dying in general. This is good.

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I don't really know! I just hit a wall of not being able to find anything else to do (apart from the ciphers and whatnot, which I want to avoid if at all possible). I think I have like 20 cubes and I've collected all the cube bits from the areas that were marked on the map as containing cube bits, and now I don't know what else I can do. I must be missing a big chunk of levels, but I can't tell where I need to go to find them since the map is useless, and it's not really any fun to wander around aimlessly in the areas I've already cleared.

I don't have a link, but the creators have claimed that decrypting the language is optional (i.e. the game can be completed without doing it).

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Just completed the game with 32 cubes, I wish there was some indication that some puzzles cannot be completed on the first playthrough. My advice if you really are stumped just leave them and come back. You keep all cubes etc in NG+ anyway. Loved the game mostly.

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I don't have a link, but the creators have claimed that decrypting the language is optional (i.e. the game can be completed without doing it).

yeah, that's what I understand; there's enough stuff unlocked by pure platforming to get an ending even if you haven't done everything in the game. (pseudo-spoilers, maybe?)

from what I've gleaned, there are 32 cubes -- unlocked by platforming and video game things -- and 32 anti-cubes -- unlocked by doing nerd shit like decrypting the hidden messages. when you have 32 cubes+anti-cubes, you can get the standard ending, but having all 64 cubes gets you the best ending.

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I wish there was some indication that some puzzles cannot be completed on the first playthrough.

Excellent news. I became quite frustrated with the game today as I felt there were too many mystery rooms I simply couldn't do anything with. Now I can take it a little easier.

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Excellent news. I became quite frustrated with the game today as I felt there were too many mystery rooms I simply couldn't do anything with. Now I can take it a little easier.

Yep I believe most of them are solvable on the 1st playthough but it seems that you need knowledge built up from the whole world so it would appear best to go through the 1st time exploring, learning and getting mainly yellow cubes + a few anti cubes that you can solve.

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Yes. I'm on my second playthrough and I feel like a genius.

Then I got stuck again and frustrated. Still, I love this game. This is the first time in years I've written stuff down in a notebook for a video game.

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Completed bare minimum ending with 27 regulars and 5 antis. There is a new game plus mode where you keep everything you've already found plus

there's a first person camera and a command you can input to fly

Not sure I could be bothered to solve everything myself on ng+. If I get stuck trying to track something down I'm not going to be shy about hitting up gamefaqs or whatever just because there were entire rooms I never got into the first time around. The map becomes more helpful once you put some more time into it. The areas are not really that big and the little preview if you stand in front of a door leading somewhere you've already been helps.

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I just got to 16 cubes and found

the other village

. I've put no time into deciphering glyphs yet, and I saw ciphers have been posted, but I kind of want to do it myself. I enjoy soaking in the ambience of this game so much that I can see myself obsessively tracking down everything.

Did anyone else notice that you can make

black holes

go away by leaving and immediately re-entering an area? I wonder if that's a bug.

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This is weird. Whenever I'm not playing Fez, I want to be playing it, looking forward to exploring and getting more cubes, but whenever I do play it I get more and more annoyed at how I seem to be awkwardly traversing an environment that hints at riddles and secrets but only really serves up the most simplistic of platform gaming.

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Did anyone else notice that you can make

black holes

go away by leaving and immediately re-entering an area? I wonder if that's a bug.

This works in general, but sometimes it takes moving more than a single room away. It should be noted that I think the black holes are positioned such that you can still get everywhere you need to go, but it's just trickier. Operating under that assumption, anyways, led to a bit of platforming (involving multiple rotates while mid-jump) that made me feel really rather clever (more so than some of the puzzles) for figuring it out.

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Did anyone else notice that you can make

black holes

go away by leaving and immediately re-entering an area? I wonder if that's a bug.

Yeh, we used this to clear a room to make jumps gettable. I think it's part of the game, 'cos near the start, the little floating cube explains to you that the blackholes come and go.

There IS a bug, however, to get the anti-cube in the 'OWL' room.

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Just got the ending. Really beautiful. I have to say, though, the game hasn't been the amazing explosion of awesomeness I for some reason was expecting. I've started the NG+, and I'm happy to see all my stuff still there, and the map just like I left it. I'll try to get everything, but, knowing myself, I'll end up wasting too much time on it until finally, gamefaqs.

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Aaand I'm done. Fez is beautiful, with a fantastic look and great music, but the game as a whole was a huge disappointment. Instead of doing what the best Myst games were great at – spreading the puzzles throughout the game, mixing it with exploration and traversal – Fez is just a platform game, and at the very end, after you've completed the game, there's tons of deep, cryptic puzzles to be solved. It seems like Phil Fish was afraid of exposing the player to the puzzles, and made them all optional. I guess that's probably fine, but, at least for me, it breaks the game entirely. First I spend hours completing the game as a platformer, and it's not a very good platformer; the controls are slow, the levels are always trivial, and towards the end you spend most of the time awkwardly traversing already completed levels to get to the ones you're still missing. Then, when you've finished this mediocre platformer you're faced with these really great Myst-like puzzles, like deciphering unknown languages and number systems, reading the environment for subtle hints, piecing together clues and drawing crazy connections... the only problem is, you already completed the game! You're now forced to yet again traverse these already completed levels, finding the right doors, waiting for levels to load, going back and forth and here and there to gather clues, and the sense of exploration is gone, and the credits have already rolled. Such a weird game.

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all right, so I just got to the first ending and started ng+.

what the fuck,

first-person view?

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Wow, really? I'm halfway through my NG+ and I'm still finding huge, new areas. Even one with a warp gate.

And I guess I don't consider the game completed until I solve the Myst-like puzzles.

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into ng+. all regular cubes and 13 antis so far. It's kind of mind boggling that I got the initial 32 without (for some reason) even seeing the

sewer area

at all. But I may be hitting the wall where I can't be bothered to decipher glyphs and will end up just gamefaq-ing the rest. We'll see. numbers and key presses I basically got down, but I don't think I can be bothered with translating actual text if that proves necessary.

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Has anyone come across the supposed

red cubes

yet? So far the anti-cubes have been quite fun to me, but none of them have been terribly challenging except to realize I probably have to have something else in order to solve one of the puzzles to get them. But a

red cube, as opposed to normal or anti

supposedly exists. What's the deal with them?

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The cube you're talking about is probably one of the artefacts.

It's to help decipher the glyphs. The Blue one is to help with number puzzles (I think).

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The cube you're talking about is probably one of the artefacts.

It's to help decipher the glyphs. The Blue one is to help with number puzzles (I think).

No, the

red cubes

are something else entirely. There are couple of really long gamefaqs threads about the "monolith" puzzle which pertain to this.

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I got the 32 cube ending, and like juv3nal had missed

the entire sewer area

and a good chunk of

the observatory/clock tower

. The latter is driving me nuts, and I'm not sure if I can be bothered to dick around with my

xbox system time

.

I deciphered the glyphs today (

alphabet, numerals, and teronimoes

), before starting NG+, and as a result could translate some of the things the big cube says to you at the beginning:

Hi there how are you? I will be your hexahedron today. So this is just a routine procedure, but I do need someone here just in case something goes wrong.

If something does go wrong, you are going to have to clean up the mess.

Hey wait a minute. Can you even understand what I am saying and what is wrong with your head? Oh well you are here now might as well do this thing. Prepare to have your mind blown.

(zap)

All right, welcome to the club. Enjoy your free hat.

I kind of thought maybe this would not work because of your weird head, but everything looks A-OK from over here.

Thanks for the hand, you can go home now. It was very nice to meet you.

I've translated so much this evening that I'm starting to be able to read whole words…

Edit: I also collected and solved all of the treasure maps on my wanderings, thought it took a while for some of the locations to become recognisable. I really loved the room with the

tuning fork rock that vibrates as you get closer to it

, because (solution)

it's vibrating the left and right sides of the controller to tell you a trigger sequence

.

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So, with no internet at home, I've been playing Fez 90's style: no walkthrough; no hints.

I like it. Not in a giddy, need-to-tell-everybody-about-it kind of way. But in a quiet, meditative, slightly obsessed way.

Beside the expected quality of the puzzle and atmosphere, what surprised me was that the control system caters for both beginners and expert: you rarely fall into pits for no reason at the beginning and by the end, you can navigate the environment very quickly by using down+release; jump-wait-up to go through the vines quicker, etc...

I've finished my first playthrough and now am at

40 something cubes (missing 2 regular ones)

in NG+. I've pretty much hit a hard wall since solving the

input based system and the nifty vibration based ones

. I'm know

trying to find the 3 remaining owls and rying to open the damn LotR door in the waterfall area[/spoilers]. I've pretty much given up on [/spoilers] the number and alphabetical system (I srot of get it, but it's too much of a hassle to translate everything by hand), getting to the clock stage without the FPS dropping to ridiculously low values and understand what's up with the black monolith

.

My main 3 gripes with the game are that

  1. solving the puzzles doesn't lead to a better understanding of how the world works and what is the History behind it (which Myst did well)
  2. there are no toys that you can experiment with to test theories about some part of the world/enigma.
  3. the game doesn't contain tools to support 'brainstorming'. The following you have been great if unlocked in NG+
    a screenshot maker with basic editing tool (or, better an in game annotation system), a translation table for the alphabet in order to replace the glyphs in-game (after you solve a simple enigma based on it), and some sort of teleporter to known area
    . Maybe the last one is a bit too much, but frankly, games like that, that requires to understand and remember a bunch of stuff should support storing, sorting and comparing ideas; because pieces of paper only can bring you this far.

I might give up soon but I haven't quite yet because I think getting all the cubes might provide a more grounded ending, that gives more clues to the universe and background. If I do give up thought, it would have been a nice ride :yep:

As a side note, I had a string of weird conversations with a friend at work who's also playing Fez: we were trying to help each other out, without spoiling each other fun; and that infused an awkward intensity in the conversation, as if we were asking for gifts that could be poisonous. :shifty:

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