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Thanks for all the effort in explaining the solutions to these puzzles. The only thing I don't understand is why the solution cubes are 7 parts and not 8. Is there some sort of significance to it?
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Mar 5, 2015 06:50
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Tengames posted:the puzzles would be a lot neater if most of them didnt just boil down to "input a button code to make a cube spawn somewhere", It seems like such a disappointing payoff , especially compared to the ones that actually show you some special places. This is why the first half (third?) of the game is so much more rewarding. When you solve a puzzle, meager as the puzzle may be, through the first half, you're rewarded with more space to play around in, a new area, a new bit of dialogue, something. The anti-cubes and hearts are just doing a puzzle on a pencil and paper, putting the result into the game, and picking up a cube. On the other hand, if such puzzles were mandatory to get to certain areas, I'd probably throw my computer out the window, and I don't even own the game.
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Mar 5, 2015 06:59
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So you're upset the puzzle game is... a puzzle game? Like poo poo, La-mulana had someone post their notebook ( spoilers http://i.imgur.com/wi6WaWm.png ) and many people talking about them having one. I do agree with puzzles mostly just asking you to put in a code, and that being a shame, but there's no more permanent way to interact with the world than the security question puzzle does, and that requires the alphabet which they didn't want you to be required to know.
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Mar 5, 2015 07:15
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frozentreasure posted:Except you didn't make up that puzzle. You made up a similar puzzle, from earlier in the game, but this is a false equivalency. I'm not going to say that every puzzle is perfect, well-designed or genius, because that's not true, but there are better ways to criticise the game than how you have done in literally every one of your posts. For all your efforts to insist that you really do like the game for its exploration, you keep on ignoring what the exploration actually does for the puzzle solving. I believe their point is that at some point the entropy of the solution given the inputs is so high that any possible solution is lost in the noise. At that point, it's no longer a puzzle, it's simply brute-forcing a solution and then trying to extrapolate a plausible explanation, no matter how convoluted. It's similar to the Kabbalah or astrology and how people are willing to read meaning into any (even highly entropic!) data that even remotely represents a pattern. The analogy to cryptography is actually not very far off. The best "cracks" of cryptographic ciphers recognize mathematically provable patterns within ciphertext, and use those to reduce the amount of entropy in the possible plaintext. Modern cryptographic weaknesses require massive amounts of plaintext and ciphertext, and yet there is some sort of mathematical deduction that gives hints as to the likelihood of one solution over another. But without a primer of plaintext and ciphertext, and without any knowledge of how the plaintext produces the ciphertext given a key, THERE IS NO PUZZLE. It devolves into a brute force solution. And I think that's the most telling part. We have one data point for this particular game experiment of the monolith. On one side, the inputs necessary could have been derived by whatever Byzantine logic Phil Fish came up with, and on the other side they could be brute forced. In the end, it was brute forced first. Not only was brute force the FIRST solution, but I propose so far it appears to be the ONLY solution. No one has yet come up with a satisfying, straightforward derivation from information the player is likely to have on hand.
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Mar 5, 2015 07:23
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I do think that having the player need to bring in information from outside the game is a bit dodgy as a way to spice up the puzzles, especially when nothing before that has really indicated that outside information is something that should be considered.
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Mar 5, 2015 07:30
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I won't have a chance to watch this until later today, so you might have mentioned it in the video, but the really silly thing about the binary puzzle is that the particular set of inputs needed to solve it is contained within the left/right sequence of flashing dots itself. So you can bash away at those for a minute or so and eventually put in the "correct" sequence and grab a heart piece without realising that the puzzle is supposed to have a deeper, crazier layer. Again: clever, but not quite as clever as it thinks it is. Bizarrely, I managed to grab that heart piece before I'd even worked out how to get the regular anticube in the Observatory. e: haha, and you did bring it up in the video. Fair enough then  .
Paul.Power fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Mar 5, 2015 |
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Mar 5, 2015 08:37
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I'm glad you pointed out the accidental shortcut in the telescope room heart puzzle. I cheated like crazy and looked up solutions for most of the puzzles during NG+, but that heart piece was one of few that I managed to "solve" legitimately myself on my first play through. It sucks to see that I didn't *really* solve it, but hey I was close enough!
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Mar 5, 2015 14:53
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Paracelsus posted:I do think that having the player need to bring in information from outside the game is a bit dodgy as a way to spice up the puzzles, especially when nothing before that has really indicated that outside information is something that should be considered. I would be fine with this if there was evidence to suggest considering certain bits of outside information, but the only thing the monolith suggests is 2001 A Space Odyssey, which ultimately has no connection to the solution - at least as far as anyone can tell. rabiddeity posted:I believe their point is that at some point the entropy of the solution given the inputs is so high that any possible solution is lost in the noise. At that point, it's no longer a puzzle, it's simply brute-forcing a solution and then trying to extrapolate a plausible explanation, no matter how convoluted. It's similar to the Kabbalah or astrology and how people are willing to read meaning into any (even highly entropic!) data that even remotely represents a pattern. Thank you, that's exactly what I wanted to say. If you look at other puzzle games like Portal or the Talos Principle, when you look back upon a puzzle you've solved and consider how the designers could have landed at that final product... well, you just can't. As far as I know, there is only one person whose custom Portal 2 puzzles have managed to match the quality and complexity of Valve's own puzzles, which even Valve acknowledged. Their puzzles generate a sense of awe where the puzzles of Fez only generate annoyance and relief. frozentreasure posted:Except you didn't make up that puzzle. You made up a similar puzzle, from earlier in the game, but this is a false equivalency. I'm not going to say that every puzzle is perfect, well-designed or genius, because that's not true, but there are better ways to criticise the game than how you have done in literally every one of your posts. For all your efforts to insist that you really do like the game for its exploration, you keep on ignoring what the exploration actually does for the puzzle solving. Of course it's similar. Nearly every puzzle in Fez is derivative of each other, so why am I or anyone else not allowed to design a puzzle that's derivative of Fez's? As for the role exploration plays in puzzle solving, I do think that element of the puzzles is really good, at least conceptually. For example, that one sequence puzzle you had to derive from that painting of a bunch of buys facing one way or another is a great way to deliver that puzzle. Doing that 10 more times in various ways is not. Using the "notes" on the classroom chalkboards to derive the number system, and "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog" to derive the language system are both strokes of brilliance, but are not used all that much.
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Mar 5, 2015 15:46
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ViggyNash posted:I would be fine with this if there was evidence to suggest considering certain bits of outside information, but the only thing the monolith suggests is 2001 A Space Odyssey, which ultimately has no connection to the solution - at least as far as anyone can tell. Except for the map resembling the Polytron logo and the game already being super self-referential, which I already brought up in the video itself. You did watch the part where I already acknowledged that the monolith doesn't have a solution and isn't really a puzzle, right? The way you're griping about it makes it seem like you think that I or anyone in the world thinks it and all of the other puzzles in the game are perfect examples of design. quote:If you look at other puzzle games like Portal or the Talos Principle...Their puzzles generate a sense of awe where the puzzles of Fez only generate annoyance and relief. Putting aside my thoughts on the Portal/Valve puzzle ethos, that's also false equivalency; you're comparing different genres and different core gameplay styles against each other. quote:Of course it's similar. Nearly every puzzle in Fez is derivative of each other, so why am I or anyone else not allowed to design a puzzle that's derivative of Fez's? That's not what I said. quote:As for the role exploration plays in puzzle solving, I do think that element of the puzzles is really good, at least conceptually. That's not what I meant. Seriously though, you have complained and complained and complained and complained throughout the entire thread. It's boring at this point. Everyone already knew your position on the puzzles several pages ago, and one of the very few rules I asked everyone follow was to not dwell in negativity; and that doesn't mean throwing out an occasional "but I really like this game". From everything you've said, it sounds like what you really like is the lie that you were sold when the game came out, rather than the reality of what Fez is. Because Fez is this collection of ciphers and systems and puzzles. Complaining about an entire half of the game this much seems really odd for someone who likes it so much.
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Mar 5, 2015 17:21
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Loving the game isn't mutually exclusive to acknowledging some of the more questionable choices in game design. I mean, I love what this game is, but some of those puzzles are ridiculous. 
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Mar 5, 2015 18:06
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Alright, I'll back off.
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Mar 5, 2015 18:22
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You use an apple computer? That's it. Voted 1, unbookmarked thread.Joking aside, it slightly scared me when you took the controller, did the monolith input, put the controller away... and Gomez kept moving. Did he gain sentience? Nice editing
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Mar 6, 2015 00:36
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Carbon dioxide posted:You use an apple computer? The controller just sends instructions to Gomez in a form he can understand. The game has always just been playing itself and we never knew it.
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Mar 6, 2015 00:51
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Am I the only one who finds the end of the video really unsettling, like chills down the spine unsettling? I don't know why, but it really gets to me and I'm slightly freaking out.
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Mar 6, 2015 01:06
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Arashiofordo3 posted:Am I the only one who finds the end of the video really unsettling, like chills down the spine unsettling? I don't know why, but it really gets to me and I'm slightly freaking out. It made me think a bit. And made me sad. Far as I can tell, the heart is all of the game's metacontent come full circle- it is literally the creator's passion to create the game, and the game itself. You have to do so much to get that far, pour your heart and soul into solving the game's increasingly obtuse puzzles- follow the creator's process and struggle through the game's frustration. You complete Fez, and in doing so, you complete Fez; as in you build it, piece by piece, and when it is totally complete... the game starts. It gets into the hands of the player. The game was... an analogy for the creation of the game?  Beautiful LP. Wonderful ending. Hope you can scrounge up other games to give this treatment because I really enjoyed the ride.
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Mar 6, 2015 01:37
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Holy poo poo, I did not know about that thing at the end  Anyways, my thoughts on the three heart cube puzzles: The observatory puzzle I got entirely on accident while just looking around the observatory, on my first loving visit. I didn't know about the tetromino input cipher, so I had no idea how to solve the anticube puzzle, and since the map told me there was things, I was looking around randomly for clues, and suddenly the heart cube popped up. I feel like if you're going to do the super obscure ascii thing you'd probably better make your code a bit more complicated than that. If they had just included a jump or something, it would have been fine and not also had the other problem of being in the pre-ascii bitcode. (Furthermore, when I was there later looking for the anticube, I thought the red lights had something to do with it and went way off track.) I really like the Security Question puzzle. It took me while to get and I felt super cool when I finally did. The "polytron" connection was something I got almost right away (thinking about what "it" is, and guessing that it's the actual game Fez, gets you there), and then I looked at the letter cubes and tried to figure out what other combinations of four letters were possible to combine with either "poly" or "tron" until I found one that made sense. As a side note, you didn't talk about one of the biggest hints for the puzzle (though it's not one that I used to solve it). Earlier in the game, you might be trying to figure out what the backstory behind the game is, and one of the places you might look is in the cryptic messages the owls say. One of them says "THE THIRTEEN CIRCLES. THE 64-BIT NAME OF GOD." If you plop the phrase "thirteen circles" into Google, you get links to Metatron's Cube. 64 bits is 8 bytes, which is 8 ASCII characters, implying the "name of god" is eight letters long. Although traditionally Metatron is an angel who speaks on behalf of the Christian God, it's not too big of a stretch to think of Metatron as an incarnation of God and thus "Metatron" could be one of God's names. What that says about the backstory of Fez, I don't fuckin' know. All this I figured out after having solved the Security Question anyway, pretty much immediately after I found that owl. If you had found the owl first, and done the same thing as me (put "thirteen circles" into Google), you might have the name "Metatron" and the phrase "64-bit name of God" floating around in your head when you came upon the Security Question. And since the question is "What's my name?" and the answer is eight letters, it seems plausible that you could solve that puzzle without even having to get the weird "hint" part. The fuckin' monolith puzzle. . . Well, I like it and I hate it. I agree that the whole "use the release date, rearrange via the tome, rotate the wrong way" "solution" is suspect. Although the Security Question demonstrated that the game is more than willing to get meta, it does so much more reasonably - after all, "Polytron" is the first thing you see when the game "reboots" during the intro sequence, which you've probably seen at least twice actually in-game, not counting the sort of outside-of-game loading sequence that you see before you start playing. So the puzzle doesn't really use out-of-game information. And the security question's hint's use of "it" without an antecedent makes you wonder what "it" is, and eventually you put "Fez the game" in there and see what happens. But the monolith, giving you only the vaguest hint (the figure-eight looking like the Polytron logo when half is burned away) and not actually any clues about the weird meta conclusions you're supposed to leap to, is just too much. If it's really supposed to be figured out from the release date, that's the shittiest and I hate it. On the other hand, if Phil Fish actually had no intended solution other than brute force, and is just trolling the poo poo out of everyone by telling people that it's solvable with outside information, then that's kind of brilliant and I sorta like it.
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Mar 6, 2015 02:28
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Now that I've actually watched the latest video, I want to add that the ending bit? If you find it unnerving? Let me add to that the fact that if you do it in on the 360 at least, it corrupts your game save. I mentioned I managed to corrupt it somehow, but that's how.
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Mar 6, 2015 05:11
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By the way, now that we've heard every track in the game: you can purchase Disasterpeace's Fez OST on Bandcamp.DumbRodent posted:Hope you can scrounge up other games to give this treatment because I really enjoyed the ride. This exact treatment? Not as likely; I don't know if I have any other games that would really benefit from the type of LP this was. But I'll be doing something even more ambitious in the hopefully not-too-distant future, and I have four or five other games that I have ideas for. After this, though, I'll try to do something a little less intensive, more akin to the Croc LP. Something I can just make some mischief with and completely wrap up in a month or two. But that's still for later; I have a couple of bonus videos for this to get done.
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Mar 6, 2015 05:34
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Mar 6, 2015 06:00
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New plan: whoever can comment in the most impressive/complex code system they can (ignoring the fact that I'll probably be too stupid to decipher it myself) gets the spare copy of Fez I've been planning to give out. Or: whoever's interpretation of the endings of Fez I like the most gets it. frozentreasure fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Mar 6, 2015 |
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Mar 6, 2015 06:03
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I don't mind if I don't get a prize or not, but I've been thinking about the endings a bit because I like this game and I've been loving the LP. Our first go around that we get from only getting only the cubes (no anticubes), is where Gomez peers deeply into the quintessential elements that define his world, and is able to perceive the forth dimension, time. From there, Gomez wakes up in his bedroom, back in the beginning of the game, as if the adventure had never happened. However, the fez is still on his head, and things are awesome. The second ending that we get from collecting both cubes and anticubes is where Gomez realizes the infinite alternate worlds where things went a little differently, but are all together the same. From this, he is able to perceive the fifth dimension, which can be called space-time. Cue Gomez waking up in his room again, but only this time it's in a different reality where the only apparent divergence is that the Hexahedron gives us different stuff. 
EagerSleeper fucked around with this message at 07:35 on Mar 6, 2015 |
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Mar 6, 2015 07:24
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frozentreasure posted:Whoever can comment in the most impressive/complex code system they can gets the spare copy of Fez I've been planning to give out. Have a puzzle: L U 0 U L L 0 L A L R R D 0 0 L A L RT L L U LT 0 L U A L RT 0 LT 0 RT 0 L L L L L R U L RT 0 U U RT 0 R R L U LT U 0 R A L A L 0 L D U A U LT 0 R L LT 0 RT U D U 0 L 0 U RT L R R RT R LT R RT U LT 0 D L U U LT L D U 0 L D U U L L L D L LT 0 RT L A R RT 0 U L 0 R D U 0 L LT 0 Hint 1: Little endian, redundant bit trimmed Hint 2: Count down for words Hint 3: Drink more Ovaltine bobbertoriley fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Mar 6, 2015 |
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Mar 6, 2015 08:54
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Mar 6, 2015 09:00
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I'm just wondering, if Phil Fish says that there are more secrets hidden away in Fez, then what or where can those secrets possibly be? Here's some silly ideas I had in the shower just now: - Is there anything hidden away in 3D glasses mode? It looks ugly enough that I can't imagine anyone playing through the game in it for fun, which would make it a perfect place to hide some sort of super-seceet message. - Having been introduced to the idea of turning Ls and Rs into binary and then into ASCII, I wonder what would happen if the other left-and-right-only codes in the game got turned into ASCII characters. Probably gibberish (♤○《■ or whatever), but you never know. Granted, chances are somebody's already tried these, but hey, it's something to talk about. e: oh right, codes. Already have the game, but they're still fun to mess around with. Here's one:  (feel free to enlarge it in an image-editing program). I've got another in mind, but can't get it written up now.
Paul.Power fucked around with this message at 09:28 on Mar 6, 2015 |
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Mar 6, 2015 09:15
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Paul.Power posted:I'm just wondering, if Phil Fish says that there are more secrets hidden away in Fez, Well, unfortunately for Phil Fish, people have deconstructed the game code and verified that there are no additional codes to input or anything. If he's telling the truth about there being more secrets, he either means that no one has correctly interpreted the setting/backstory/ending, or the true "solution" to the monolith. Also, I think maybe Fish said that before anyone knew about the disintegrating heart cubes, so maybe he was talking about that.
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Mar 6, 2015 15:57
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DontMockMySmock posted:disintegrating heart cubes
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Mar 7, 2015 03:18
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sudonim posted:What was the deal with that? I didn't really follow what happened there, somehow twiddling some artifacts destroys the red cubes? What's the sequence for that and where did it come from? Someone hacked the game and found out there was a code in that room. You have to select the letter artifact, do some inputs, then select the number artifact and do some more.
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Mar 7, 2015 04:03
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Personally, I have nothing against the monolith puzzle. Stupidly difficult batman-logic puzzle have their merit in an age when the academic assembly of the internet can come together and figure out, say, PT. Despite the difficulty of the puzzle, even with brute force, I can't help but notice the fans of Fez figured it out. Maybe some puzzles have to be that way in this day and age. You might bank on the fact that people will love your game enough to pull it off and put at least one puzzle in that has no answer, but requires brute force. Someone would figure it out and put it on Gamefaqs, I'm sure.
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Mar 7, 2015 04:53
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Grimwit posted:I can't help but notice the fans of Fez figured it out. No, they didn't. They brute-forced an answer, then they back-justified it with a bizarre ad hoc just-so story that is far-fetched, defies previously established conventions, and not confirmed to be the official answer.
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Mar 7, 2015 18:56
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Has it been mentioned that the poster in Gomez's room is similar to the LoZ title screen?
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Mar 7, 2015 19:12
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DontMockMySmock posted:No, they didn't. They brute-forced an answer, then they back-justified it with a bizarre ad hoc just-so story that is far-fetched, defies previously established conventions, and not confirmed to be the official answer. That's what he meant, they cared enough and were diligent enough to brute force the answer. Then they tried to reverse engineer a possible answer.
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Mar 7, 2015 19:31
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Grimwit posted:Maybe some puzzles have to be that way in this day and age. You might bank on the fact that people will love your game enough to pull it off and put at least one puzzle in that has no answer, but requires brute force. Someone would figure it out and put it on Gamefaqs, I'm sure. Making a puzzle that can only be solved by looking it up on the internet to counter people looking up puzzle solutions on the internet is a little like treating a stab wound by shooting yourself. You're only adding to the problem. Meanwhile if you're doing it to encourage people not bothering to solve puzzles themselves...why are you making a puzzle game in the first place? I thought the point of puzzle games was to figure things out? Or better yet, make it even easier by printing all the solutions in the back of the manual for people to peek at if they're stuck. (Obviously with big warning print on the page before so people don't just stumble on them unawares.) Might & Magic 4 did that, and it was a fantastic game (though an RPG rather than a puzzle game).
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Mar 7, 2015 19:41
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So... the writing and number cube are used in making the heart disappear, and the book is (arguably) used in solving the monolith. So what's with the skull cube?
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Mar 7, 2015 20:39
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So what is the result of putting in the disintegrating hearts code? It took you back to the title screen (unless you did some editing for that) and then what? I was half expecting it to delete the save.
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Mar 7, 2015 20:40
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BAILOUT MCQUACK! posted:So what is the result of putting in the disintegrating hearts code? It took you back to the title screen (unless you did some editing for that) and then what? I was half expecting it to delete the save. There are more videos coming.
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Mar 8, 2015 00:02
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My take on it is that in order to know to do that, you have to break into the heart of the game and read its code. Not the most complicated of takes, but eh.
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Mar 8, 2015 03:42
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You've taken a labor of love and destroyed it with your disgraceful hacker ways.
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Mar 8, 2015 04:07
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It would be interesting to see a puzzle game where the parameters to puzzles (and thus the solutions as well) were variable. Thus the internet might be able to share the relevant methods, any given user would still have to implement them. Maybe I'm just grasping at straws here and this sort of thing is insidiously difficult to implement, but it would be a change from the current business of what happened with Fez et al.
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Mar 8, 2015 19:03
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NGDBSS posted:It would be interesting to see a puzzle game where the parameters to puzzles (and thus the solutions as well) were variable. Thus the internet might be able to share the relevant methods, any given user would still have to implement them. That's a good idea, but so many relatively prolific point and click games did that so badly that I think the industry has been burned on it. It it ever happens, it will be a small indie project.
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Mar 8, 2015 20:08
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NGDBSS posted:It would be interesting to see a puzzle game where the parameters to puzzles (and thus the solutions as well) were variable. Thus the internet might be able to share the relevant methods, any given user would still have to implement them.
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Mar 8, 2015 22:06
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