Fez is coming to PC on May 1 through Steam

Last year’s indie darling Fez now has a release date for its outing on the PC. According to Eurogamer , creator of the game Phil Fish revealed in an AMA session on Reddit that the game will be making its way to PC on May 1. The game will be available on Steam. He also revealed that there won’t be a 3DS version of the game, and that he is in talks with Sony for a PS3 version.

“People keep assuming Fez would be a no-brainer on 3DS, but in truth it would be kind of pointless,” he said. “The game is practically always shown in isometric 3D, there’s never any perspective there. I don’t think it would work.”

On the gameplay design side of things, Fish said that he didn’t want the game feature an in-game map at all. Instead, he wanted players to make their own maps as they explored the game’s world. This idea was scrapped when the developers tried it themselves and found that the world they had designed didn’t lend itself well to being drawn on graphs.

May 1 feels so long away!

“Originally I wanted no map at all. I wanted people to draw their own maps,” Fish explained. “But then I realised that the way the world of Fez is structured makes it really hard to ‘graph’ it. That was confirmed when we finally decided to give making the map a go. I’m not 100 per cent happy with how it turned out. It’s probably one of the weakest aspect of the game.”

Fez is a puzzle platformer that was in development for five years. You control a small white creature named Gomez, who lives happily in a floating 2D village. He comes across a magical fez hat which reveals that the world is actually three dimensional. The main gameplay mechanic is the ability to perceive the 3D world and shift dimensions, but you’re able to move across only 2D plans. Gomez has to collect several pieces of a giant magical cube with this newfound ability as the cubes are causing the fabric of reality to tear apart.

The main goal of Fez is to collect the 32 cubes to rebuild the Hexahedron and restore Gomez’s world before it is torn apart. Cube and cube fragments are visible and are collected by simply going near them. Players can also collect 32 anti-cubes by solving puzzles, many of which require some knowledge of cryptology and analysis. As cubes and anti-cubes are collected, doors are unlocked and the player can access new areas.

Players can shift the perspective of the game at any time and rotate the world by 90 degrees. This reveals new doors and passageways and causes platforms to re-align on the screen.

Fez was first announced in July 2007, and an early version of the game was shown off during the 2008 Independent Games Festival. Even then, the game received praise. The development faced problems, though, as the company, Polytron, lost its funding and encountered legal problems. This was mainly due to Fish’s business partner leaving the company and threatening legal action.

Fish had revealed that the game will be making its way to other platforms back in January.