It's time for your weekly(ish) free game alert: Fez, the colorful 2D puzzle game with three dimensions, is now free for the week on the Epic Games Store.

Fez is a game about a little marshmallow-headed guy named Gomez who is shocked to discover that two-dimensional world in which he lives is actually only one side of four sides of a world with depth. Puzzles are solved by rotating the world's sides to align its portals and platforms. It's odd but really good: We hit it with a 90/100 review in 2013 and five years later, it still shone as a "stunning puzzle platformer with one of the best soundtracks in games."

And it's free, which as I always like to say it a big plus. Get it here.

Next week, Epic is going back to two giveaway games: The haunting puzzle platformer Inside, and because it's M-rated and thus not available to EGS users with parental controls enabled, the indie pixel platformer Celeste.

As you amble around Fez’s opening village, with its blue skies, gently swaying pixel grass and fluttering butterflies, it’s hard to believe the creation of this place involved so much stress and turmoil. Severe delays, loss of funding, legal disputes, multiple redesigns and other problems plagued the game’s development—as shown in the fantastic 2012 documentary Indie Game: The Movie. But you don’t feel any of that when you play it. The atmosphere is serene, the pace is gentle, and it’s just a nice place to exist in. 

Fez released on Xbox 360 in 2012 amid a lot of noise about its troubled development, the divisive opinions of outspoken designer Phil Fish, and whether it lived up to the hype or not. So it’s nice to return to Fez now the dust has settled and appreciate it for what it is: a clever, stunningly beautiful puzzle-platformer with a neat open-world structure and one of the best musical scores that’s ever accompanied a videogame. 

Composer Rich Vreeland, better known as Disasterpeace, doesn’t get enough credit for establishing Fez’s unique ambience. His score is delicate and atmospheric, like a Chopin nocturne colliding with the dreamy, sweeping synths of a Vangelis movie score—although he admits to only listening to the Blade Runner composer after hearing people frequently make the comparison. It’s one of the few game scores I listen to regularly, standing on its own as a remarkable album of electronic music.

Fez’s world is a varied one, and the score reflects this. The music is chirpy and upbeat in those leafy, blue-skied levels, but when you delve into crumbling temples and underground caverns, it takes on an eerie, enigmatic quality. Ico is one of Fish’s favourite games and Fez shares its knack for making its world feel ancient and mysterious. The arcane puzzles, alien languages and idiosyncratic architecture make Fez’s world a beguiling one, giving you the feeling of being a trespasser in some forbidden, forgotten place, eager to decrypt and unlock its history and many secrets.

The influences don’t end with Ico. Fish considers Fez to be a direct reflection of him, an extension of his ego: particularly the formative games he played growing up in Montreal. In Indie Game: The Movie he talks about getting a NES for Christmas with Tetris, Mario and Zelda: three games whose imprint is felt throughout Fez; look closely at any level and you’ll see that the structures and objects are made up of tetrominoes. But Fez’s brilliance lies in how it uses these familiar influences to create something genuinely new and distinctive, rather than just dining out on nostalgia. 

The central gimmick is, of course, shifting perspective. Using a magical fez, hero Gomez can turn his 2D world temporarily 3D, twirling it around to solve puzzles and navigate the often vast, sprawling levels. The bespoke Trixel engine is still really impressive, looking like flat pixel art until you alter your perspective, revealing an intricate threedimensional world. And it’s a wonderfully versatile system, offering an abundance of clever puzzles and platforming challenges. Fez squeezes an incredible amount of variety and surprises out of this one seemingly simple concept. 

But the thing I really love about Fez is its structure. To reach the end (well, one of them) you have to collect cubes scattered around the world. But the order in which you do this is entirely up to you. It’s nicely liberating, and encourages exploration. Look at the map and you’ll see a blank area connected to your current location, indicating there’s an entrance somewhere—and likely a hidden one. The world is a complex labyrinth that can be confusing to navigate at times, but is a delight to pick away at, uncovering new areas and mining them for cubes. Some cubes are complete, while others have been shattered into pieces that you’ll find scattered around the level, usually hidden in cracks and crevices that you can only see by changing perspective. And there are some neat one-shot gimmicks too, like using levers to raise and lower water, and sections where your dimension-altering powers are limited. Fez was years in the making, and it’s clear why. There’s so much in it, so many ideas and so much imagination.

“It’s like a volumetric Metroidvania,” Fish told Official Xbox Magazine in 2012. “Rooms connect in every direction. I structured it like the first Legend of Zelda in the sense that you can play these areas in any order. There isn’t really a critical path or a right way to do things. It’s just: here’s this world, it’s full of nooks and crannies and secrets, now go explore.” 

Fez is light on story, but the idea is that its digital world is fragmented, breaking down, and you’re trying to make it stable by collecting cubes. It pulls some neat tricks with fake-out glitches and crashes, and sometimes a level will be polluted with fractures that suck Gomez into a void when touched, making navigation much trickier. It’s funny too, with irreverent dialogue, a charming self-awareness, and cute touches in the animation of both Gomez and the people and creatures around him. 

Late in the game you visit a village where no one speaks English or, err, whatever Gomez’s language is. But it’s possible to decipher it using clues in the game, revealing their dialogue. “Haha, check out Mr Rectangle Head over here!” mocks one villager. “What’s wrong with your head?” says another. When you first see this language, made up of abstract, pixelated hieroglyphs, you think they’re revealing some ancient wisdom that might come in handy somehow. But nah, they’re just making fun of your head. 

When you finish Fez a new game plus option unlocks, in which your cubes, keys and other collectables carry over, and you get access to new areas that you’ll need to hit 100% completion. You also unlock a pair of sunglasses, which don’t just make you look extra fashionable, but enable you to switch to first-person mode and view the world in 3D. It’s a cool extra, granting you a third perspective, even if it doesn’t have any real practical use. Fez is full of secrets like this, and it’s best if you find them without using a guide. Although that may be easier said than done: some of its puzzle solutions are really obscure.

“So many games are about putting you in these incredibly stressful situations,” Fish told Destructoid in a 2011 interview. “It’s always a threat or a conflict. It’s about quick reflexes. But when I sit down to play a game at the end of the day, I don’t wanna be put in that situation. I wanna unwind. So I wanted to make a game for people who are sick of that, too.” 

While there are a lot more games that fall into that category in 2018, this is one of the main reasons I’m on my third playthrough of Fez. It’s just so damn chill. And although it cribs from some of the most recognisable games in this medium’s relatively short history, there’s nothing else that feels quite like Fez. It’s a true one-off and, like the best games, it hasn’t aged a day. If it was released today, it would likely attract just as much acclaim as back then. 

As for Fez 2, well, I’m not holding my breath. The sequel was announced in 2013 at E3 and a short teaser was released, but a month later Fish unceremoniously cancelled it and left the games industry. But after the hell he went through making the original, I can’t really blame him. I’d love another Fez, but the original remains a modern classic and is well worth playing today without the hype weighing it down.

Last week, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds smashed the Steam peak player records. The previous record-holder, Dota 2, while admittedly made by one of the world’s biggest and most powerful games companies, began as a Warcraft mod. These days, we barely blink an eye at the idea that a game can come from nowhere and shake through word-of-mouth, clever concepts, a bit of cool technology like Portal’s… well, portals… or simply by hooking into some reservoir of good feeling, and accomplish more than any marketing budget can dream of. Minecraft is this generation’s Lego. Undertale is one of its most beloved RPGs.

Indeed, the world of indie development is now so important that it’s hard to remember that it’s only really a decade or so old. That’s not to say that there weren’t indie games before then, as we’ll see, but it was only really with the launch of Steam on PC and services like Xbox Live Arcade that the systems were in place to both get games in front of a mainstream audience, and provide the necessary ecosystem for them to quickly and confidently pay for new games.

The massive success of indie games on Steam has of course come with attendant pitfalls. The early access program gave small studios the ability to beta test their games with player numbers they would not otherwise never reach, and gave players the ability to take part in shaping games. However, a lack of guidelines left players and developers with very different expectations as was seen in the reaction to a paid expansion being released for Ark: Survival Evolved while it was still in early access. Steam Greenlight made it easier for indie games to get on Steam but became a popularity contest that was easily gamed, leading Valve to replace it with Steam Direct.

All this is largely taken for granted these days, with the big challenge for modern indie games being to stand out. Simply getting onto Steam back then could set a studio up for life. These days the market is full to bursting, with most new releases disappearing from sight almost at once.

In both cases though, it’s a world away from how the market began.

Back to the start

The exact definition of ‘indie’ has never exactly been cut-and-dry. To some, it’s an aesthetic, best summed up by the classic bedroom coder. To others, it’s a more commercial distinction, of working without a publisher. To others, it’s ultimately about the work, with an indie game standing out more for being not the kind of thing you get from a commercial company, rather than really focusing on who made it. 

There are many definitions to play with, and few hard lines to draw. The poster-children of ’90s shareware, id Software (who you may know courtesy of a little game called Doom), began working under contract for a company called Softdisk, cranking out games like Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, Hovertank 3D, and Catacomb 3D, before moving on to make games with/for shareware giant Apogee.

In the very early days of gaming, just about everybody was indie to some extent. In 1979 Richard Garriott set out on his path to buying a castle and going into space by selling copies of his first RPG, Akalabeth, in ziploc bags at his local computer store (one of those copies then ended up in the hands of California Pacific, who offered Garriott a publishing deal). Sierra On-Line began in 1980 as just husband and wife team Ken and Roberta Williams, making simple adventure games like Mystery House that nevertheless pushed the boundaries of what people expected from games at the time—like having graphics—before booming to become one of the biggest and most important companies in gaming history.

Companies could emerge from almost anything. Gremlin Interactive began as a computer store called Just Micro, while DMA Design, originally Acme Software, which would make its name with Lemmings and much later become Grand Theft Auto creator Rockstar, began from its founders meeting up at a computer club in Dundee and ultimately signing with Psygnosis. Whole genres were created from a single game, such as Football Manager in 1982.

The speed of all this took many by surprise, with Balance of Power creator Chris Crawford saying in 1984, "We have pretty much passed the period where hobbyists could put together a game that would have commercial prospect. It’s much more difficult to break in, much less stay in. If you want to do a game, do it for fun, but don’t try to do game designs to make any money. The odds are so much against the individual that I would hate to wish that heartbreak on anyone."

The shareware revolution

But of course, people continued. The PC was largely left out of much of it, however, due to the relatively high cost of disks and its general perception of not being a gaming machine. In the UK, the main indie scene in the ’80s was on cassette based 8-bit systems like the ZX Spectrum, with publishers happily accepting almost any old tat, recording it to a tape, sticking it in a box, and selling it for a few pounds at newsagents, game stores, and anywhere else that would take copies. They were cheap, sometimes cheerful, and allowed for endearing weirdness like 1985’s Don’t Buy This—a compilation of the five worst games sent to publisher Firebird.

It would be many years before most indie PC games could get that kind of placement. Instead, there was shareware. The concept dates back to the 1970s, though it was popularized by PC-Write creator Bob Wallace in 1982. Rather than having a central distributor like a regular published game, users were encouraged to copy software and pass it along. If they liked it, they’d then send the creator a check to unlock the full thing or get more of it. 

In the case of Apogee Software, and indeed what became known as the Apogee model, a game might have three parts. The first one would be free, and free to share, the other two commercial and only for registered purchasers to enjoy. (Not that anyone really listened, as the vast, vast numbers of pirated copies of Doom probably shows better than anything.)

The beauty of the system was that anyone could distribute these games, with the rule being that while you weren’t allowed to sell the shareware version, you could charge for materials. That meant games could appear on magazine cover disks and later CDs. They could be on any university server or dial-up BBS or services like Compuserve and AOL. If you wanted a relatively full choice however, you often needed to send off for them. Whole companies were set up to sell just the trial versions, sending out printed catalogues of their stock and charging by the disk. 

By the mid-90s of course the popularity of CD had rendered this relatively pointless, with ‘1000 Games!’ CDs available in supermarkets and bookstores and anywhere else there might be an audience, rarely mentioning the part about them being glorified demos. Much like on Steam today, at this point most smaller games got lost. Still, as a player, it was an almost inexhaustible feast.

As crazy as sending off a check to get a game might seem, it worked. In a few cases, registered shareware games even made the jump to boxed products in stores, though that was relatively rare. Either way, shareware was hardly a license to print money for most, but it supported many a developer throughout the '90s and made others their fortunes. Epic MegaGames began with the text-based RPG ZZT before becoming the company that made Unreal. Duke Nukem began as a very simple 2D side-scroller, notable mostly for oddities like the main character wearing pink and just wanting to save the world so that he could get back to watching Oprah, but nevertheless blossomed into Duke Nukem 3D before publicly wilting into Duke Nukem Forever. 

And there were many more stars too, regularly appearing in new games or simply popular ones that kept showing up, like Skunny the squirrel and his awful platforming (and ultimately karting adventures), Last Half of Darkness, and Hugo’s House of Horrors, much beloved by magazine and compilation editors for its extremely pretty first screen, and never mind that it was all made of clip art and every other room in the game was barely MS Paint-level scribbles.

The alternative industry

Shareware's big draw for players was, inevitably, free games. The downside of the Apogee model and others that erred on the generous side was that a whole episode was often enough—especially as that’s where the developer’s best work tended to be. Compare for instance the deservedly beloved shareware episode of Commander Keen: Goodbye, Galaxy! where you run around a beautiful, varied planet, with the dull space adventure of its commercial sequel. Not every game could be Wolfenstein 3D and promise a fight with Robot Hitler if you paid.

Less cynically though, shareware gave many genres their home. The PC was typically seen as a business machine, with its commercial successes often adventures, RPGs and other slower and more cerebral offerings. There were platformers and beat-em-ups and similar, but they were usually poor conversions from other platforms at best, with few worth taking a risk on. 

Shareware removed that risk factor for customers, while letting developers show off. The original Commander Keen, while simplistic to modern eyes, was proof that the PC could do console-style scrolling, even if it wouldn’t be until 1994’s Jazz Jackrabbit that anyone could seriously claim to be doing convincing 16-bit console-style arcade action and visuals. (Even then it wasn’t a very strong claim, but luckily by this point the PC had Doom and so didn’t care.)

This led to a flurry of games you really couldn’t get elsewhere, or that were in very short supply on the shelves, from vertical shooters like Major Stryker, Raptor, and Tyrian, to fighting games like One Must Fall, to quirky top-down RPGs like God of Thunder, and racing games like Wacky Wheels. It offered a great split. When you wanted a deep, polished experience, you had the commercial game market. For action fun, there was shareware, not least because when we did get big games like Street Fighter II, they tended to stink. Shareware supported the industry through much of the '90s.

The high cost of indie

By the mid-90s though, there was a problem. Commercial games began rapidly outstripping what bedroom teams could do, both in terms of technology and complexity of content. While there were engines available, they were mostly poor quality, with nothing like Unity on the market and the likes of Quake and Unreal costing far too much for anyone but other companies to license.

If you wanted to play with that kind of technology, you were looking at making mods instead. This was the era that gave us the likes of Team Fortress (1996) and Defense of the Ancients (2003), but also where the indie scene became largely forgotten. This wasn't helped by the fact that indie had essentially no place on consoles at all, despite a few nods over the years like Sony’s Yaroze console, a development PlayStation aimed at hobbyists released in 1997. The PC saw its own push towards home development with tools like Blitz Basic/BlitzMAX (2000) and Dark Basic (also 2000), with the goal of inspiring a new generation of bedroom coders. However, despite selling reasonably well, none of them gained much traction or saw many releases.

The indie scene as a whole ceased to be a big player in the market—which isn’t to say that it vanished. Introversion’s Uplink for instance was a big hit in 2001. Jeff Vogel’s Spiderweb Software started releasing old-school RPGs like Exile and Geneforge in 1995. PopCap began in 2000, becoming the giant of casual games like Bejeweled, Peggle, Bookworm Adventures, Plants Vs. Zombies, and Chuzzle—not bad for a company that was originally called ‘Sexy Action Cool’ and planned to make its debut with a strip poker game. 

And of course, there are other notable exceptions, such as Jeff Minter, who never stopped making his psychedelic shooters both for himself and others. However, it wasn’t until 2004 when Steam nailed digital distribution that the market had a chance to explode and offer a real chance of going it alone.

The turning point

Steam wasn’t the first digital distribution system, and at its launch it wasn’t even popular, with Valve forcing it on players for both Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike. However, it was the first major attempt that nailed the details, like being able to download your games on any computer you owned rather than having them locked to just one, and being able to do so perpetually, rather than simply for a year, as was the case with most of the competition. 

The results spoke for themselves. When Valve was a lot pickier, and being backed by a publisher was a distinct advantage to getting onto the system, any developer who managed to get onto Steam effectively received a license to print money. Farther afield, though games not on Steam were at a distinct disadvantage, the legitimisation of digital distribution as a concept certainly raised most boats.

And with all this came something just as important: the indie game ecosystem. With money to be made and developers flocking to indie for all sorts of reasons (being tired of the big companies, wanting to make a go of an independent project) it became viable to create tools and systems to help make the scene. Game Maker for instance, and Unity and Flash. Today, would-be indie developers have the tools to go head-to-head with even the biggest studios, albeit typically on a smaller scale, as well as explore more cost-effective options like pixel art and procedural 3D, while services like Kickstarter and Fig offer a way of seeking funding without immediately selling out. 

This also opened the definition of ‘indie’ even further, with companies seriously able to consider going it alone, without a publisher. Not everyone could be Double Fine, raising $3.5 million for Broken Age, but many have had huge successes—Pillars of Eternity pulling just under $4 million, the Bard’s Tale getting $1.5 million and in the height of Kickstarter fever, even Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe managing to raise $650,000 for a remake of the first game.

It’s at this point that the word 'indie' really catches on. Again, it’s not that it was never used, but until this point the scene wasn’t big and important enough to warrant a position as basically a shadow industry in its own right. The release of Cave Story in 2004 was where people really started talking in those terms, with Indie Game: The Movie in 2012 cementing this, highlighting three of the most successful titles of the time—Braid, Fez and Super Meat Boy. 

Microsoft embracing the scene via Xbox Live Indie Games played its part, as did their XNA development system, and attempts to make a big deal out of indie launches during its "Indie Game Uprising" events between 2010 and 2012. 

Elsewhere, the IGF (Independent Games Festival) launched in 1999 was also going from strength to strength, drawing more attention to the likes of Darwinia, Monaco and Crayon Physics Deluxe. We also saw more overtly indie friendly portals like itch.io, and the Humble Indie Bundle, offering new marketplaces and ways of selling games—even if many later bundles proved a dead-end.

Perhaps most excitingly, it’s now that we start to see whole genres and styles largely associated with the indie market either flourish or come into existence, not least the ‘walking simulator’—games primarily about exploring a space and a story through environmental detail and voiceover. The first big name here was Dear Esther, a free mod released in 2008 and later remade in 2012, with later examples including Gone Home, Firewatch, and Everyone’s Gone To The Rapture.

There’s also the pixel-art aesthetic of games like VVVVVV, Super Meat Boy, and the original Spelunky, and for many old-school gamers, a return to brutal old-school difficulty. And somehow I doubt we need to say much about Minecraft. (It’s been quite popular, and influential.) Classic point-and-click adventures also saw a resurgence outside of Germany, largely spearheaded by the Adventure Game Studio creation engine and the success of Wadjet Eye Games’ The Blackwell Legacy, Gemini Rue, Technobabylon, and the upcoming Unavowed.

But it’s of course reductive to pick specific genres. The joy of indie games is that as long as the money can be raised somehow, a passionate team can take on more or less whatever they like, free of publisher interference or perceived wisdom, allowing for arty games like Limbo and Bastion (distributed by Warner Bros, but only as a publishing partner), throwbacks to lost genres like Legend of Grimrock, exploratory pieces like The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide, or completely new concepts like Superhot, where time only moves when you do, and the ferociously complex Kerbal Space Program, where difficulty really is a matter of rocket science.

The downside is that as ever, it’s not enough to simply make a game. An indie title buffeted with word of mouth can sell millions, but far more are doomed to languish largely unplayed and discussed in the depths of Steam’s increasing piles or other services’ far less traveled shelves. The initial gold rush is very much over. Still, plenty of gold remains. It’s impossible to predict what game will be the next Spelunky, the next Minecraft, the next Undertale, or the next Super Meat Boy, but absolutely no risk at all to bet that whatever it is, it’s already on its way.

We probably won't ever see Fez 2, but we can console ourselves, maybe, with this surprise, whopping patch for the original game, which has just been uploaded to Steam, three years after the game launched on PC. Update 1.12 whacks in a speedrun mode, better music streaming, and various other tweaks and fixes, as elaborated in this news post over on Steam.

To access that speedrunning mode, it appears you have to type in "--gotta-gomez-fast" after launching the game, although the post is a bit vague so I could be wrong.

Fez programmer Renaud Bedard began work on the patch over a year ago, an update he sees as the game's last:

" Since I shipped FEZ 1.11 I had little intention of making additional fixes or features to the game because I simply don t have the time with a kid and a fulltime job and working on FEZ is getting old after 9 years. So I did want to address problems that people have with the game, but I don t want to do it for the rest of my life. I had spent enough time away from the game that I was somewhat enthusiastic about coming back to it, especially if it s at my pace, and that it s my last time doing so."

Originally released in 2013, Fez is a clever and tremendously popular platformer that, as we noted in our review, suffered from one particular shortcoming: "Being download-only, it's a pity that Fez can't somehow come packed with its most essential peripherals: a notepad and pen." Two and a half years later, that problem has been solved in the Fez Limited Edition—at least for gamers willing to pay the price.

The Fez Limited Edition is pretty much the opposite of a Black Friday deal, costing a whopping $100. For that, you'll get the notebook we wished for, "bound in red canvas with debossed gold foil inlay presented in a matching slipcase," as well as DRM-free copies of Fez for the PC and Mac, and the award-winning Disasterpeace soundtrack. It's physically small, measuring just 5.5" x 5.5" x 1.625", but the images on the Polyshop page really do look lovely. 500 are being made, and each one will be numbered and signed by Fez creator Phil Fish.

This is obviously for serious Fez fans only, but as an aficionado of swanky game boxes, I have to say that I'm impressed. The Fez Limited Edition is available for pre-purchase now, and has an estimated ship date of December 18; unfortunately for anyone looking for a killer holiday gift, Polytron warns that it "is not expected to ship in time for delivery before December 25." And if you'd just like to give Fez a try without all the fancy (and expensive) swag, it's also available for half price on Steam—that's $5/ 4—as part of the Autumn Exploration Sale.

Thanks, Gameranx.