I made a unsolvable puzzle before.... I took 2 identical puzzle boards... and replace one piece from one board with the other board BUT a different shape. Til this day I'm considered one of the greatest puzzle creators alive because nobody has ever solved it. What's brilliant about it, all the pieces can fit together just not at the same time, so there is always one remaining. This makes them work for hours, days and decades without ever solving it.
I doubt anyone will listen. anyway is mistranslated or can be translated to "Opaque". The meaning of the word literally fits the themes. and if you take out all the vowels you are left with "pq' which looks like a pair of glasses... which i believe is the reward...
Interestingly enough, the black monolith means the same thing in 2001 (book and movie). While the sequel book eventually did give it an explanation, that's not its purpose in humanity. It represents the currently inconceivable unknown and inspires everyone to pursue something further for no real reason other than we are human and that's what we do.
+Leon Voskuil I've tried just about every free video recording software and this, unfortunately, is the best quality I could get. I hope to, eventually, have much better quality of both audio and video, then I will return to my earlier videos and do them in better quality. As of right now, I don't have the money to buy proper software or the time to learn it.
+Me and My Puzzles Very understandable reason, I liked the content anyways and addition of video. I've never played Fez, I've seen my brother countless times sitting before his Xbox trying to figure these puzzles out with a note book besides him, so my knowledge is very limited. The monolith to me, seems like a reference to 'Space Odyssey' where they have a black rectangle monolith appear a few times throughout the movie. I belief it stands for the unkown, but the way it appears in the context of the movie gives much more meaning to it, which is open for interpretation. I see that in the context of fez it also stands for the "unkown"; but I think that is just the nature of the appearance of the black monolith; In what way does the context of Fez add meaning to the black box, to me it seems it just reflects the unkown and like you said Fez is about exploration through puzzle solving; but this isn't much of a puzzle, it seems more of a mystery. One that has only been solved by brute force and not yet through the rules of the game. How we interact with this mystery, this uncertainty, is what also gives a lot more depth to the world of Fez. The full Picture will probably only be known if the game has been fully discovered, which might never happen without insight of the developers. I'm probably reading into it a bit too much, I like to ramble a lot, haven't really fully gathered my thoughts on this and this derives a bit from mechanical game design and a bit more into the Artistic/philosophical context games can give. So excuse me :p But in short; What context does Fez give to that uncertainty? Since it hasn't been fully solved we can't say much about the full context, but we can talk about our interactions with this mystery and how that creates context. (my brother just told me that the black monolith has different measures in the movie which the Director put a lot of emphasis on, that the measurements are a big part of the feeling it gives. He also said that a developer said there were un- solved/found puzzles left, just a few weeks ago)
Cool and interesting video. I feel a lot of similarity between you and mark brown and you definitly have potential to put quality content out like him. So keep on making these! Mark Brown has a sensible video on Ico that is about designing by subtraction which is really similair to how Jonathan Blow thinks about his games, you might be interested if you didn't know it already.
+Leon Voskuil Thanks for the kind words. I know of Mark Brown, so you comparing the two means a lot to me. I'm looking forward to raising the quality of my videos.
+Me and My Puzzles I can't believe this is your first video, you have a very on point analytical view with nice examples to match. If you don't mind me asking; Are you a designer/student/reviewer where did you learn the skills to make this? Do you have any idea what your next subject is going to be about and are you only going to analyze puzzle games?
+Leon Voskuil A lot of the things I talked about in this video come from the interviews with Jon Blow himself (particularly /watch?v=gwsi7TEQxKc). I also liked Braid a lot, which encouraged me to look deeper into it. Besides that, I don't have any experience in the game design field besides what I've seen in videos and read on forums. The next video I have planned will be on the black monolith in Fez, called 'Why the black monolith is a bad puzzle and why that's okay.' I plan to talk about mostly puzzle games because that's the one genre of video game I don't see a huge amount of discussion on, which means it will be the easiest for my content to be new and interesting. I may talk about other games, or puzzles within non-puzzle games, but puzzle games are the ones that interest me the most. I don't often play other kinds of games anymore: they take too much time.
