Throwback gaming

“Fez” is a game that makes you wish you were still in elementary school.

Its puzzles and design demand that you talk to your friends to figure things out rather than taking the easy way out looking online for solutions. It’s a great throwback to an era of game design that taught the player through actual gameplay and not tutorials.

Fez plays out like a traditional 2-D platformer with the twist of rotating the game’s world three-dimensionally, essentially giving every screen of the game’s world four variants. From the start of the game, most of the world is open to you, letting you solve puzzles and explore at your own pace.

Though the plane-changing mechanic is great, the game shines in its puzzles that demand you pull out a pen and paper and write things down. It’s like a 2-D, gorgeous pixel art tribute to adventure games such as “Myst.” The game is not for everyone because it never holds your hand.

But for those looking for some mind-bending puzzles harkening back to an era in which a game taught you how to play through its gameplay, it’s perfect.