Game Blog 5: Fez

Game Blog Week 5

Game: Fez

Question 1: As the player, do you interact with a character or an avatar and how does this affect your involvement in the narrative?

Fez is a 2012 indie puzzle platformer developed by Polytron Corporation. It appears to be a run of the mill 2D platformer with a unique pixel art graphic style, that is until you progress to the first major story point. You met Dot, a little tesseract that guides the main “character” Gomez through the world and he informs you about the wonders of the third dimension. You play the rest of the game with the ability to rotate the the 2D world in a 3D space and use these different views to traverse the levels and solve puzzles. In Fez you you interact with the world through Gomez, a little two dimensional creature, though you are technically acting through a character Gomez felt much more like an avatar in my experience it. This was due to the little to no backstory provided on Gomez, we don’t know what it is or where it lives but with this lack of information we are able to instil our own interests upon Gomez also Gomez’s character plain white design is very basic, even for pixel art, it was like the developer wanted to give the player a literal blank canvas to project themselves into this world. As well as the lack of backstory, Dot never address Gomez by name so it is as if Dot is speaking directly to the player, this makes the player feel that the entities within this game world are contacting with them directly, once again deleting the intermediary character personality that is Gomez. On top of this the game has little to no structure in terms of order of events you feel directly involved with the narrative because you are creating it as you go. Apart from the very start and very end of Fez there are no scripted scenes and no barriers that are there for no apparent reason, this makes Gomez and integral part of the narrative because without him it wouldn’t exist but then by extension it is you the player that is involved in the narrative because of how transparent Gomez is as a character. Overall your experience with Fez feels much more personal than many other games where you are playing through the eyes of a pre-created character but I think this is used to positive effect as it draws the player into the beautifully simplistic world that is Fez.