The game’s slick but blocky graphics ooze retro charm, and the chiptune music manages to be appropriately period but also haunting at times. (My NES never really produced video or sound like this, as much as my memory insists that it did.) You guide your behatted protagonist through a series of increasingly complex puzzles which require the use of the fez’s magical extradimensional world-rotating puzzles to solve. It’s a deceptively simple gameplay mechanic with complex level design consequences.

Gaming Editor Kyle Orland noted in our original review that “…there are the many puzzles that I felt I could solve only if I was a mind reader with a direct connection to Phil Fish.”

In fact, Fez‘s weakness is that it might be a little too polished. “Fez is not the kind of game that holds your hand and lays out the exact steps to finish its most frustrating puzzles,” Orland continued. “Instead, it frequently throws you into rooms festooned with obscure symbology and cryptic pixel-art wall drawings, challenging you to figure out what exactly it wants from you.”

Scattered through the game’s levels are clues and messages, giving the obsessive or completionist-minded player an entire separate meta-game to wade through on top of the platform. It culminates in a final puzzle whose solution still remains somewhat of a mystery—it was “solved” more than a year ago via brute force, but the reasoning behind why the solution works is still unclear. One could easily envision Phil Fish, his fingers worn down to bloody nubbins after years of unending work on the game, laughing maniacally in front of his development computer as the endgame puzzle folds up on his screen like Lemarchand’s box.

Whatever awaits, we look forward eagerly to playing the game on PC when it comes out in May.