Fez / YMMV - TV Tropes

Americans Hate Tingle: Non-native English speakers often feel the puzzles related to the in-game language are unfair and esoteric. In particular, the "Rosetta Stone" involves recognizing the phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". For comparison, English-speakers might feel it's unfair if a French-developed game required recognizing "Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume" ("Take this old whisky to the blond judge who is smoking"). Then again, it might have been esoteric for both native and non-native speakers had the key been something like "The five boxing wizards jump quickly" or "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow".
Awesome Music: The whole soundtrack, composed by Richard Vreeland AKA Disasterpeace. But the best is probably Adventure. Listen to it yourself.
Best Level Ever: The one where "Sync" plays, AKA Music Rooms.
Broken Base: According to the Steam reviews, Fez is either a subpar platformer that quickly gets boring after the perspective change's novelty fades, or it isn't "really" a platformer and is actually a brilliant puzzle game.
Fridge Brilliance: Geezer passing on his love of adventuring to Gomez makes sense; he can't travel through the third dimension anymore not just because he's old... it's also because he's missing an eye. A person's two eyes is what allows them to see the world in three dimensions; losing an eye causes you to also lose your depth perception, which means it's then impossible to see in three dimensions.
I Am Not Shazam: Lots of players habitually call the main character Gomez, "Fez". Mainly because of... well his fez.
It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: Aside from the novelty of the perspective rotation, a lot of the original appeal was the zeitgeist of the community built around deciphering the most difficult puzzles. Now that the game has been "solved" for over a decade and all the answers to even the most difficult puzzles are easily available online, many new gamers aren't interested enough to decipher them on their own, largely judging the game by its platforming mechanics. Even returning veterans sometimes feel that "the magic is lost".
Misblamed: Phil Fish's supposed antipathy towards Nintendo (and his being a vocal supporter of the Play Station Vita) has been blamed for the game not getting a port to the Wii U or 3DS. In reality, Fez was an Xbox exclusive for a year, and shortly after it came out of exclusivity, Fish dropped out of the industry and any further involvement with the game. So, while it's possible (albeit unconfirmed) that Fish may have been against the idea of porting it to Nintendo's platforms, the final decision would have rested with publishers Polytron — and it's far more likely that they simply decided against Nintendo ports because the Wii U was selling poorly, and a 3DS port would have required essentially rebuilding the game from scratch (some reports have indicated that the game probably wouldn't have been ported to the Vita either, if not for a combination of Fish's enthusiasm for the platform and Sony offering to foot the porting costs in order to make it part of their cross-buy initiative). Even with all that confusion, the fuss became an eventual moot point when the game got a Switch port in 2021.
Moe: Gomez. Heroic Mime though he may be, his design and Idle Animations make him downright adorable.
Older Than They Think: The perspective-shifting mechanic did not originate with Fez. It existed in 2008's echochrome and several Flash games before that.
Overshadowed by Controversy: The game's creator, Phil Fish, is a controversial figure and that's putting it mildly. A good chunk of those who follow the Indie game scene hate his guts over unrelated matters, thanks to things he has said, and the game he made is usually relegated as a very unfortunate victim of the crossfire. In particular, a surprising number of people first heard about the game from the firestorm that led to the sequel's unfortunate cancellation.
Scrappy Mechanic: Once you know how to decipher the language, it becomes incredibly tedious to translate all the writings, which must be done manually. A mod exists to change dialogue from the Cube and Zu people to English characters.
That One Puzzle: The Black Monolith takes the cake. The other heart piece puzzles are diabolical, but both have at least part of their answer provided within the game. The Black Monolith, however, appears to be a complete enigma; the puzzle was ultimately solved by complete trial and error, and the exact method the players were supposed to use to solve it has never been found to this day (though theories abound as to how players were supposed to discover the correct combination). Of course, it's possible that the trial and error method was the intended solution, especially since the other two heart piece puzzles also required outside knowledge to solve (one of them requiring knowledge of both the in-game alphabet and the name of the company that made the game, the other requiring conversion between binary and ASCII which almost certainly cannot be done by hand).

YMMV / Fez

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