FEZ - 14/20 hours

It turns out FEZ is not the game I thought it was. The impression I got from the store page, and the first few hours of gameplay, was that it was primarily a platformer. And it was under this impression that I approached the game. My focus was entirely on navigating the world. Occasionally, I would have to push switches or throw bombs, and my thought was that those little challenges were the bulk of the game's puzzles. I saw the mysterious runes in the background, but I assumed they were simply decorative (or, perhaps, one of those inconsequential easter eggs that rewards people who are super into a game's lore). I did not realize that I was playing a cryptography game, and that those runes were, in fact, most of the game's content.

The QR code should have tipped me off. It was a weird puzzle that required me to rotate the room arbitrarily, and the reward came out of nowhere, after a series of actions that had no in-setting causal explanation. That should have primed me to think about rotation codes as a general game mechanic, but I thought of it as a one-off thing - a weird, overly clever, chamber that tossed an extra cube my way for being willing to look stuff up on the internet. I was wrong.

In my defense, though, it's not as if FEZ goes out of its way to teach you how to play. There's no particular indication that deciphering the code will yield tangible rewards, and thus the only way to know that the language is worth decoding is to decode the language.

So, there came a point when my progress was completely stalled. There was literally nowhere else I could go. And there was no chance I would break through, because my thoughts were not even in the same universe as the game's. So, of course, I looked up a guide.

The revelation was not a pleasant one. Cryptography is not my favorite activity in the world, but I like to think that if I'd known I was supposed to be doing it, I'd have had the patience to see it through. That's belied by the fact that I repeatedly went back to the guide whenever I ran into a minor speedbump, but my self-flattering theory about this is that I felt blindsided by the game itself, like it somehow violated the unspoken social contract between player and game, and that since I completely missed the bulk of the information necessary to solve the puzzles, it was no great sin to lean on a pre-assembled cipher.

Or maybe I just felt like I didn't want to put that much effort into what I was still stubbornly thinking of as a charming little platformer, and my building resentment manifested as a deliberate disregard for FEZ's intended methods of solution.

It's funny how patience works. There was a level, late in the game, where I had to climb up a tower, outracing some steadily rising lava, and halfway up were these rotating platforms that I had to jump through with precision timing. If I missed a jump, that was basically it, I'd have to start the whole level over again. I must have died at least a dozen times, but it never occurred to me to give up. I just had to keep trying until I got the rhythm perfect. Yet the slightest bit of frustration with code was enough to send me running for a guide.

I wonder why that is. Is it because I feel like I'm pretty good at platforming and pretty bad at codebreaking? Or perhaps it's because a platforming challenge inherently includes an element of feedback, whereas with the codes, if I made a mistake, I'd only know about it when the whole sequence failed to work, and thus every error forced me to start back at square one. It could be that I'm simply not very intellectual . . . which is an interesting thought considering I'm also a huge nerd.

I've still got six hours to go with FEZ. I managed, using the guide, to get 100% completion (and it doesn't feel super like cheating to me, because even with the guide, I had to play for 6 hours to get to that point). So, obviously, I have to start over again, but what is my agenda here? I think I've got to solve the code "honestly." Pure honesty is, of course, impossible, because I've been spoiled on a couple of things someone coming in "raw" would have to find out the hard way, but I can still attempt to make amends to the game by trying to experience as much of it as possible.

FEZ - 5/20 hours

I'm of two minds about this game. As long as I'm making progress and discovering new areas, I'm pretty happy, but it feels at times like that FEZ is gleefully opaque. Like, what the hell is this:

Obviously, it's a QR code - I'm not completely out of the loop. However, if you're like me, you do not have easy access to a QR reader (because, why would you), and thus this is just a big roadblock from straight out of nowhere. It was easy enough to look up online, so it's not a huge deal (it kind of stings my pride to look up hints this early, but then again, it's not the sort of thing that can actually be solved by the human brain, so I'd have had to use an outside computer program either way), but as a game mechanic, it is thoroughly unappealing. I kind of wonder what they were thinking.

Overall, I'm finding the game to be mostly fun, but mentally fatiguing. I like navigating the levels, but backtracking to find missing secrets is a pain in the ass. I also don't understand the treasure maps at all, and I have a feeling there are certain game mechanics I am not yet aware of, because the map is showing exits that are not all apparent.

That's the paradox of exploration games. Am I not finding anything because there is nothing to find, or because it is simply well-hidden? I've never really enjoyed that sort of uncertainty, but I do enjoy jumping around and rotating the levels, so there's more good than bad.

I don't know how much more of the game I have left, though I have 23 cubes and 4 anticubes, so I'm pretty close to getting through a big 32-cube door. I think that means I'm pretty close to the end of the game. After that, I'll go back and find all the secrets.

FEZ - 2/20 hours

FEZ is a game where you control a cute little white-blob creature called Gomez. Gomez lives in a 2-D world where no one believes in cubes, which they call "devil squares." Why and how they have a superstitious name for cubes, when, as two-dimensional creatures, they have no frame of reference for such things, is not explained.

Anyway, the common beliefs are wrong. Cubes do exist, and are, in fact, essential to the functioning of the world. When the big cube breaks, the leader of the community, Geezer (who looks suspiciously like a future version of Gomez), tasks Gomez with saving the world, and gives him a magic Fez that lets him travel through the mysterious third dimension by rotating the world. Using this ability, he can overcome obstacles that are ordinarily impassible and find secrets that are hidden in the incomprehensible corners of the world.

The goal of the game is to collect cube shards, to assemble into cubes, to open doors, to find more cube shards. You know, typical platformer stuff. Overall, I really like the game. Navigating the levels, flaunting the rules of space by rotating the map, and figuring out tricky jumps are a blast. My one complaint, thus far, is that backtracking is a pain in the ass, so if you miss something in a level, replaying the level to do extra exploring is not especially viable. I think this is caused by things like one-way portals, non-obvious connections between levels, and jumps that are easier to make forward than backwards. Plus, the world map is basically useless.

It's not enough to discourage me from playing the game, but I anticipate that if I ever get to a point where my forward progress is stymied, I mind find the structure of the game to be incredibly frustrating.

Though, it's probably a bit premature to be so pessimistic. Thus far, the game is a brain-bending delight.

FEZ - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

Gomez is a 2D creature living in a 2D world. Or is he? When the existence of a mysterious 3rd dimension is revealed to him, Gomez is sent out on a journey that will take him to the very end of time and space. Use your ability to navigate 3D structures from 4 distinct classic 2D perspectives. Explore a serene and beautiful open-ended world full of secrets, puzzles and hidden treasures. Unearth the mysteries of the past and discover the truth about reality and perception. Change your perspective and look at the world in a different way.

Previous Play Time

O hours

Expectations and Prior Experience

This game is on my challenge list because it was bought for me by my friend, Daniel, but it was actually on my Steam wishlist. I cut my gaming teeth on 2-D platformers, and so seeing a new, highly regarded, one come out for the PC immediately piqued my interest. The whole "2-D character in a 3-D world" gimmick also appealed to the lingering vestiges of my mathematical training.

I have nothing but high expectations for this game. I love the genre, I'm completely sold on the twist, and I'm curious to see the unique levels and puzzles that its premise makes possible.

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth - 20/20 hours

At twenty hours, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of this game. I played two games to completion, fully explored the tech-tree, and maxed out two of the three affinities. But I have not yet finished a game on normal difficulty, and I still have half the factions to try out, and I've barely paid attention to the reams and reams of flavor text that accompany technological advances, affinity levels, and completed quests.

That last one, especially, feels like a mistake. Part of the draw of the game is its sci-fi trappings, the work that went into creating and fleshing out a plausible future world, and the inhabitants, ideologies, and machinery therein. Yet, thus far, I've only really engaged the game on a mechanical level. I've tried to figure out how it works, but I haven't been paying attention to what it's trying to say.

I'm not sure how much I'm actually missing. Some games, like Bastion, have great storytelling. They use the virtues of the medium to create a form of presentation that sticks with you, even when the actual details of the story are not especially strong. Civilization: Beyond Earth seems like the opposite.

It is clear to me that a lot of thought went into the game's world-building, there are hundreds of voiced quotes from various hypothetical futuristic books and lectures, and a whole in-game encyclopedia that details the origins and implications of the stuff you build and research. Yet, despite all this effort, it almost feels like the game is apologetic about the very fact that it's telling a story. To discover all the background work, you have to dig for it. The vast majority of the flavor is hidden inside menus. The encyclopedia takes you out of the game-screen entirely, and even the stuff available from the main interface (such as the quest menu) is completely skippable.

I understand that the reason for this is to allow the player maximum autonomy. Those who are really interested in the story can search it out, whereas those who don't care are not bothered by intrusive pop-ups or narration. And I can respect that decision, but it made the story and the world feel a little bloodless to me, as if it didn't really matter, and that I was simply enjoying a sci-fi skin on a strategy game that could have taken place anywhere.

I think, in the future, I will resolve to actually do the work and deliberately seek out the story elements, but that is a goal for another time. For now, I'm ready to move on to a new game. While I'm generally positive about Civilization: Beyond Earth, I think it still needs a bit more polish before it can stand aside the classics of the genre.

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth - 17/20 hours

Well, I did it again. I stayed up way too late playing Civilization: Beyond Earth. I expect that if I didn't have to occasionally take breaks to write this blog, I'd probably be at least 25 hours in by now. If the game had dropped on one of my days off, I probably would have gotten to 20 hours after the first day of playing.

So, that must mean that the game is pretty good, right?

Not really. Though it's a little hard to explain why.

Civilization is like the world's most complicated board game. You have a map that is divided into tiles (the first four games used a square grid, civ5 and BE use a hexagonal grid). Each of these tiles is worth a certain amount of resources. Traditionally, the three resources are food, production, and commerce, though civ5 changed "commerce" to "gold" and the sci-fi games use "energy" which is more or less the same same thing (there is a bit of nuance to this, that I don't want to go into just now).

In order to access these resources, you have to build cities. A city will allow you to work one tile per point of population, out to a certain maximum radius. To claim more territory and get more resources, you have to found more cities. Cities use food to build up their population (each point of population requires 2 food to sustain it, if your tiles produce more than that, your population grows, if they produce less, it shrinks), production to build units and buildings, and gold to pay maintenance costs and (in emergencies, because it's generally inefficient) to buy things instead of building them (the advantage of buying is that it's instant). In all the civ games prior to 5, you used commerce for science as well, but in civ5 and BE, science is tracked separately.

In addition to cities, you also control units. Mostly these are your military - anything from armored knights to fighter jets, but there are a couple of special use units that range from the handy (civ2's caravans) to the absolutely essential (colonists units to found new cities and worker units to improve tiles and increase their yields).

Cities can also build various buildings, which can have a wide variety of effects. Usually, they improve your cities' output, but some building will improve your units, or make your tiles more valuable, or make your cities more resilient in combat. There is a special class of buildings, called "wonders" that can only be built once, anywhere (so if your opponent builds them, you are SOL). Wonders most often have an effect on your whole society, often granting blanked bonuses to all of your cities and/or units, though sometimes they just have a powerful effect in a single city, or provide a useful one-time bonus (like a free technology).

What you can build in Civilization is determined by your technology level. As the game goes on, you research new technologies to unlock buildings and units (and sometimes, learning new technologies will just give you direct bonuses, like increasing the movement of your ships or making your tile improvements more powerful). Learning new technologies is not a straight line, however. Rather, you progress along a "tech tree," where learning technology in one area unlocks the potential to learn more sophisticated versions of that tech later on (so, for example you might progress from bronze working to iron working to steel, but someone else could learn writing then literature then education).

The game is divided into turns, and the whole strategy of it revolves around using those turns well. Units can move only a certain number of tiles per turn. Cities take multiple turns to build things. Every turn you earn a certain amount of science points which will help advance your technology (this is important because earlier technologies in the tree cost less than later ones, so it's often better to go back and branch out and learn different areas than to just always chase the most advanced thing available - so, for example learning bronze working then writing then iron working then literature, etc, instead of specializing in one field).

To win the game, you have to pursue one of several victory conditions. The most obvious is to simply wipe out the other players' civilizations. Obviously, if they have no cities they can't build anything, and thus they can't threaten you. So, once you've taken over all their cities, you win (civ 5 changed this so you only had to take over their original capitols, which is not quite as satisfying, but is considerably faster). But you don't have to be violent if you don't want to. There's always at least one peaceful way to win. Usually this is by launching a spaceship (and thus proving your ultimate mastery of the tech tree), but the later civ games have introduced more elaborate ways to leverage your civilization's diplomatic relationships and cultural achievements into victory.

And that, in a nutshell, is the core of the Civilization experience. Every game in the series has those elements in common. And because the core is so strong (seriously, it is impossible to play this game for any length of time without falling into a hypnotic trance), it's really difficult to make a bad Civilization game.

That said, the games in the series are not all created equal. You can judge them based on the nuances of the execution. How long does it take to process each turn (and how does that vary in the different stages of the game)? How long does it take to build things in the cities and how does that compare to the research times on the tech tree? How powerful are the units compared to one another, and how long do they stay useful? How does a peaceful playthrough compare to a military one? How fun and engaging are the victory conditions?

You have to view a 4X game as a harmonious whole, where the various elements combine to make you feel like you're in control, your choices matter, and your success and failure depend more on your tactical and strategic acumen then they do on simply knowing the ins-and-outs of the system and exploiting oversights in the game design.

So far, Civilization: Beyond Earth feels a little half-baked. Its big innovation is a change in the shape of the tech-tree, so that instead of having to learn a particular series of prerequisites, each new basic tech has two possible root techs, and you only have to learn one or the other to advance. This is an intriguing idea, but I'm finding it makes the game very unbalanced (though, to be fair, I have been playing in on the easiest difficulty just so I could go through the tech tree and see what everything did). I'm also less than impressed with the game's victory conditions (they mostly seem to be of the "build this useless thing and guard it" variety). And I'm finding the differences in the affinities to be less compelling than advertised.

Further complaints:

Wonders are too bland and don't have enough of an effect to justify seeking them out.
High level building and units cost so many resources that you only get a limited number of the game's coolest toys (though, perhaps, this is just me whining)
The unit upgrade system locks you into choices that you may wind up regretting, and in any event reduce your military flexibility for no good reason.
Buildings are generally pretty boring and require you to shape your development strategy around chasing many small bonuses.

Yet, I wouldn't be too hard on the game. It's bound to get balance patches as people discover its flaws, and the inevitable expansion will shake things up and add cool new wonders, units, and gameplay mechanics. It's practically a truism of the series at this point. The initial release version is a fun tech demo, but it's not until the second expansion that it becomes a classic. And if that sound a bit cynical and defeatist, well, that's only because it downplays the fact that Beyond the Sword and Brave New World were both really, really good expansions.

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth - 10/20 hours

Ten hours in less than one day, spent on a game that is, technically, broken. That was not unexpected. I think, fundamentally, I simply can't say "no" to a 4X game. Of the turn-based 4X games in my library, only Fallen Enchantress and Space Empires IV have less than 30 sunk into them, and even then, the reason for that is that I own strictly superior sequels to both. Discounting those two and Beyond Earth, the average for the rest of my games is 100 hours (there are a couple of outliers - Space Empires V, at 37 hours, and Civilization V, at 345 hours).

Obviously, I love the genre, but why?

If I had a mutant ability, it would probably my resistance to boredom. If I had a superhero weakness, it would be my inability to multitask (my comic-book adventures would . . . not be popular). These types of games require the player to sort through a lot of information and to make a myriad of small decisions, but the turn-based structure divides time into easily manageable units. It's an abstraction that means you can have the sensation of having to do a hundred things at once, but the reality is that "at once" can actually mean "over the course of several minutes."

I find it a bottomless well that I can fill with my attention. Over the course of hours, my colony will grow, from a humble group of Franco-Iberian artists, put on a spaceship for some reason, into a world-conquering force of fanatical human purity, driving levitating tanks and artillery over the world's oceans to bring the peace of the sword to those who would condemn the ambition of my regime.

And it's the foreknowledge of the epic sweep of history, along with the memory of the care and planning that went to build it up, combined with the low investment of playing just one more turn, that makes these sort of games addictive. I've never tried drugs, but I can't imagine there is any chemical substance more enthralling than a really compelling 4X game. When I'm playing, nothing else matters. I've skipped meals, skirted dangerously close to neglecting my job duties (I've got about 20 minutes worth of paperwork I have to do each night, and there are times when I've finished it during the last half hour of my shift), and stayed up way too late to play these games.

So, I'm really the last person to say whether a particular 4X game is good or bad. I can say that I wound up getting 6 hours of sleep today, due to overplaying Civilization: Beyond Earth and that is a game where the individual terrain tiles are smeared due to my underpowered graphics card. At a certain point, you just stop noticing . . . well, anything. Sub-par graphics, fatigue, the world itself. None of it compares to the feeling of striding an alien world like a living god, knowing that you command unstoppable armies of high-tech hovertanks, and that it was all due to your planning and design. And, of course, if you just play for a little while longer, your victory will be complete.

I may have a problem here.