Fez!

I love Fez. Really, truly just love this game. And since I just finished it (all 209.4% of it) it's fresh in my memory.

You play Gomez, the happy little guy pictured. He lives in a two-dimensional world which gets transformed into 3-d. He has to restore his world to two dimensions by collecting and re-assembling the hexahedron which broke it. He's given a fez that allows him to rotate buildings and be 2-d in a 3-d universe.

Fez was challenging for me because it's a platformer. Jumping is my Achilles heel. It requires finesse and precise movements, neither of which I have. On second thought, they're actually getting better. My introduction to jumping and flying was in Journey, which has very little. But it was still hard to do.

The first platformers I played were incredibly challenging, but Fez was fun. Psychonauts (and that stupid Meat Circus) and Thomas Was Alone were good  teachers. The best thing about Fez is that you can't die. If I died every time I missed a jump and had to start all over, the controller would have been through a window after an hour.

The mechanics of the game added to its enjoyability. It's very much like NAME? in that changing perspective changes the moves you can make. Two ledges may be on opposite sides of the building, but by rotating right they form a single line that can be walked across. It's doesn't take that long to get used to, especially if you've played NAME. The sheer amount of creativity and ingenuity that went into creating this world is impressive.

There are, however, a few issues. The map is 3-d and a little hard to read. Most scenarios (rooms?) have several branches and it's nearly impossible to remember which branch is through which door. This makes navigating a pain in the ass. Getting to a room on the other side of the map requires playing back through the towers you've already been through, then trying to find the door that will lead you to right linking scenario. Rinse and repeat through multiple scenarios until you get there. Thankfully, there are warp gates that help you short cut, but it still leaves you two or three scenarios to get through instead of ten. This gets tiresome and is slightly frustrating.

The objective of the game is to collect enough cubes to reassamble the hexahedron. Many of them are easy to find, but many of them are only attained by solving complex puzzles using an alternate alphabet and numbering system, neither of which are explained. There is a tabula rosa of sorts, but deciphering it requires a particular bit of English/American cultural knowledge. If you don't find the tabula rosa, don't recognize what it is, or generally don't want to spend time decoding it, the internet is your only hope.  Without walkthroughs and forums finishing the game would have been impossible.

Speaking of internet, there are some puzzles that can only solved by going on it. There are two QR codes and the solution to the hardest puzzle in the game was only solved after months of work by multiple people. These games simply aren't fair and take away from an otherwise brilliant game.