Fez

Fez looks at first glance like a charming pixel-art platformer, yet its central idea is far cleverer. Little Gomez receives a magic hat that lets him realize his flat world actually has three dimensions, and from that moment on he can rotate the entire scene in quarter turns around a vertical axis. You still only control a two-dimensional character, but by changing the viewpoint, platforms that seemingly don't connect suddenly join up and open a path to places you couldn't otherwise reach. A simple idea thus becomes a full-fledged space for puzzles.

The game emphasizes discovery rather than skill. Enemies are practically absent, falling won't kill you, and there's nowhere to rush to, so all the tension comes from the question of where to go next and what the strange symbols scattered across the world mean. Besides collecting cubes that unlock further areas, Fez contains a second, much deeper layer of puzzles built around its own alphabet, number system, and ciphers hidden directly in the background. Many players never finish this part alone, and solving it became the subject of a massive collective hunt by the player community at launch.

Technically it's a combination of pixel art with three-dimensional space, and the scene's rotation is accompanied by pleasant animation that explains the whole trick without a single word. On PC the game runs undemanding, offers higher resolution than the original console version, and plays comfortably with a gamepad. The atmosphere owes a great deal to ambient electronic music, dreamy and slightly hazy, which underscores the feeling of wandering through a half-forgotten dream about old games. Fez launched first on console, and its long development became part of the story of the independent scene. Today it remains one of the most original games to ever come out of indie development. Anyone content with the main collectible track will finish the game in a few hours; anyone who dives into decoding the hidden ciphers will spend many times longer with it and will eventually reach for a notepad all the same.