Jo's blog

Majesty

Celebrating FEZ’s release on Steam, here’s a few words on my love for the game.

I’ve always been a big sucker for pixels, they’re in my nature, which of course is why when Simon showed me his project, Owlboy, I was so enthralled by it, I dropped everything and vowed to help him continue and finish it.

I felt that Owlboy had a certain kind of spirit, one that reminded me of the games I had used to play as a kid, a spirit I felt had been put under pressure from modern game design for many year.

Adventure

When I started development on Owlboy, I also started to pay close attention to the large formations of Indie legends that existed, which is when FEZ came to my knowledge. Along with Owlboy, FEZ seemed to tip it’s hat back at the age of my childhood.

As I progressed through FEZ, I found it got adventure, puzzles, insanely beautiful environments and as I was playing it, a great sense of flow and wonder was always looming, together with a fear of death. The game intentionally went out of sync sometimes, and even the randomly spawning glitches in the game’s world were out to get you.

I love FEZ to bits, and even though I’ve completed the game on my Xbox back home, I’ll probably go completely nocturnal again and play through it on my PC when it comes out tomorrow. In addition, I got me some time off and hexel’d this little piece:

Reflection

Like a beacon, FEZ has successfully lead me to find many artifacts from my younger memory. Reflecting upon it, I hope Owlboy will carry a similar compass, and lead people who play it to forgotten memories, bringing back a time when gaming went beyond social networking, external achievements and by-the-book-monetizing, and was more about adventure, magical surroundings and a sense of wonder.

To the PC players out there, Happy FEZ’ing

Also, If you havn’t heard it yet, I highly recommend you to get the absolutly majestic FEZ soundtrack here: http://disasterpeace.com/album/fez.