I hate this game. The difficulty scale is all over the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ place and the gimmick isn't even interesting. Most of the puzzles can be described as "turn the camera until you're looking in the correct direction" and there's very little skill involved beyond some light trial and error. This game also does the thing where the every single level is connected, but since each level can be connected to up to six (!) other levels, it's impossible to navigate. I got through about 90% of the game before realizing there was a map and once I started following it, it literally didn't help at all. The music is uninteresting, The story is--well, there is no story. The other characters that you can find on a few levels serve no purpose and have no relevant dialogue. The one thing this game has going for it is the pretty graphics. This game is really pleasant to look at, but that doesn't really count for ♥♥♥♥ because it's a pain to play. I haven't even gotten to the worst part yet. Remember at the beginning of this review when I said the difficulty was wack? Well, I only explained half the issue so far. While the normal puzzles that you need to solve to progress are easy, some of the secrets are absolutely impossible to figure out. If you play through the game normally, you will probably begin to suspect that there is more to the game than just solving basic perspective puzzles. In fact there is, and I'm going to explain why it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, but don't read it if you care about figuring it out for yourself, though I doubt you will!

Throughout the game, there are runes etched in stones scattered across the levels. If you thought they were just decorative, YOU ARE WRONG. They come in two varieties, one of which encodes camera instructions, and one of which encodes hints in English. Now, I was able to figure out the simpler code after hours of head-scratching but I was absolutely stumped as to what the more complicated one could mean. I ended up googling it and it turns out that there is one otherwise innocuous room tucked away in a random location that has "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" scrawled on a blackboard in the background, and that's how you're supposed to figure it out. Now, I had been to this room several times but I didn't even SEE the blackboard because it BLENDS RIGHT INTO THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BACKGROUND. Not only that, but there's no indication that this one wall out of ALL THE RANDOM WALLS IN THE GAME is useful to solving the puzzle. It's not like this is the only room that doesn't otherwise serve a purpose either! There are a bunch of empty rooms that do absolutely nothing but this one in particular happens to be the key to solving LIKE A QUARTER OF THE SECRETS IN THE GAME. Honestly, the one moment of enjoyment I had while playing the game was when I figured out the first code. I really felt like I had accomplished something. That feeling went away after I looked up the second one. It's not like solving these puzzles unlocks anything interesting either! It just lets you get whatever collectibles you hadn't gotten yet.

The nonsense doesn't end there, though. There's an optional puzzle in this game that has a solution so obscure that the only way people figured out how to solve it was by ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BRUTE FORCING IT. Did I also mention there's a puzzle in one of the levels that requires you to wait actual DAYS in real time to complete, with practically no indication of how much time is left? And if you don't happen to catch it at the perfect moment then you have to wait all over again? Yeah, real engaging gameplay Phil. Ugh. This game somehow manages to be the least challenging and most insanely difficult game at the same time. It's a bloody miracle. So yeah, Fez is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mess. If you don't believe me, try it for yourself. You'll experience the boredom, the loneliness, the frustration at not being able to solve the most cryptic ♥♥♥♥ ever, the feeling of emptiness inside your soul as you traverse dozens of indistinguishable maps looking for some secret that you missed, only to find some ♥♥♥♥♥♥ runes etched into a rock that you don't know how to read. "Oh well," you'll think to yourself. "I'll come back to this later when I've figured more things out." And you will come back, again and again, only to be just as clueless as the first time. ♥♥♥♥ this game, ♥♥♥♥ Phil fish, and ♥♥♥♥ all the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who call it a masterpiece. 2/10.