A Fez Megatheory: Incompleteness

Disclaimer: I don't have the answers. I can't tell you how the Monolith or the Heart Reboot is solved, or what the soundtrack puzzle means, or what this "final secret" is.

In Fez, there are concentric squares. Seven of these are legitimately findable, and one is not. The 4th square is in the fractal room, where it is impossible to see it. What we have here is an incomplete set of squares.

I don't think this is an accident or an oversight. Players were supposed to find all the other squares and say "There is a glaring hole in this sequence; where is the fourth square?." I think there's a reason it is in the Fractal room. The cube in the room is made of 7 bits and is incomplete. As you zoom into the empty space made by the missing bit, you find some more bits, which partially fill that void, but never reaches completion. It is a geometric metaphor for incompleteness. It seems meaningful to me that the missing square would be in the same room.

If you step back and think about FEZ as a whole, it seems to me that the incomplete cube, sitting right by the missing and unviewable square is a quiet statement as to the nature of the game. Fez is incomplete, not in a "didn't finish development" way, but in a game-completion way.

We start with game with mystery and 0% completion. What is this giant cube saying? Why did it explode? Why did the game reboot? The game then provides a simple, gamer-friendly goal: find all 64 cubes, assemble the hexahedron, win the game. The cubes are easy enough to obtain, and you complete half the hexahedron that way. The remaining anticubes require some more digging around, but some seem unobtainable. Then you get the 32 cube ending and you get the 3D glasses and you are able to solve the rest of the anticubes and you assemble 64. Actually, some of those anticubes were so difficult that most of us may not have even achieved the 64 cube ending without the internet. But even that almost-unreachable ending doesn't exactly provide closure. And so many questions remain unanswered, like what is the implied back-story with the skull I found and what's written in this book and where is the satisfying character arc closure with this character Dot and what is with that burned map and what did I even really accomplish and sooo many others I can't even list. None of the strings are tied up satisfyingly. You can continue to push to fill that missing void of information, learning zuish and figuring out what the hexahedron was saying. It just gets deeper and deeper, and eventually someone on the internet decodes the tome and, then there's the red cubes.

Oh, the red cubes. The first two red cubes are legitimately solvable, though practically impossible (the vast majority of us probably found out by looking online. I know I did), but the monolith puzzle is missing essential information. Like the missing cube in the fractal, a portion of the information exists in the game, but essential information is missing, literally burned from existence. The 3rd red cube is like the 4th unviewable circle, in that it exists in the game despite being legitimately unobtainable and essentially incomplete. But even this we overcame, by bruteforcing it. (another thing to note is that the final code is either 7 bits or 15 bits long depending on how you look at it, and incomplete) But the reasoning behind that solution is still a mystery, still a missing void to us. You would expect that having three red cubes, you would have a fourth cube to finish that sequence, but no such cube exists in the game. Then there's the heart reboot, which really comes out of nowhere, which we still can't explain, which also gives the letter cube and the number cube some purpose, leaving the skull cube, item#4, the odd one out.

This is just like a giant fractal. No matter how deep you go, there are unfillable holes, which you can partially fill only to find more unfillable holes. The 4th concentric square, the second half of the monolith code, the 4th artifact, the 3 red cubes, at every level the game is tantalizingly incomplete. As gamers, we chase closure. And most games give us closure, some make us jump through more loops than others, but that 100% is there if you do enough. You can find all the collectibles, understand all of the backstory and get satisfying character arc closure. But Fez is modeled after the fractal, and is essentially incomplete. Layer upon partially completable, yet essentially incomplete layer. Those of us who frequent this reddit are probably used to having beat the whole game, but if you look back at how far we've gotten through decoding the game and obtaining what should normally be basically impossible to obtain, it's pretty mind-boggling.

In the 32 cube ending, we zoom into the fez universe on the microscopic, and we are shown a fractal and we zoom in and in and in. I think that this 32 cube ending, the simplest and lowest order and most easily forgotten layer of the fractal that is fez is telling us "This universe is fractured at a fundamental level. It is essentially incomplete. There is insufficient information to answer the questions you have." This, I think, is the grand meaning to Fez.

"No, nobody has worked out the actual solution.. umm.. or if there is even one." -Phil Fish