The Shrine

Already beat Bastion and in the process of beating Fez. In both cases, I've actually gotten every achievement on both of these, which is an extremely rare thing for me. (Winterbottom is probably the only other game that I can claim that with.)

For those that don't know about these games, buy them. They are awesome and addictive. My review of both:

Bastion
Imagine taking the mechanics of Secret of Mana's fun use of melee weaponry, and add in some guns and heavy weapons to the mix. Then toss in some gorgeous graphics, a cool soundtrack, fun ways to up the difficulty, and a unique narrative-driven story (with what had to be literally hours worth of voice acting footage) with two different endings. This is Bastion.

http://www.gametrailers.com/reviews/gbp ... ion-review

Fez

Fez is about a 2D character that suddenly acquires the ability to view the 3D perspective. But, it's not true 3D. You are still on a 2D plane, except with the ability to turn everything 90 degrees. All of the 3D aspects become flattened, in what can be described as folding 3D space into 2D. This makes it possible to join together pieces that are far away or closing the gaps of distant jump points.

At its core, it's a 2D/3D adventure/puzzle game. But, this one surprises with hidden complexities. The kinds of puzzles you find are very innovative and parallels what you would find in a game like Braid. Seriously. It doesn't look like it on the surface, though. Here's some examples (hidden if you don't want to spoil those kind of details):
http://www.gametrailers.com/reviews/untneu/fez-review

Rich Vreeland, the Musician wrote:Fez's proprietary music system was developed by Renaud Bedard, with plenty of input from myself and others. This robust tool allowed us to treat the music in Fez modularly, writing multiple versions of tracks, often split into individual elements, to be played at different times of day (in-game), and in different levels. The music system also handles loop playback on an element to element basis, using tempo and bar counting. This allowed us to write songs made up of elements of different bar lengths, and give them their own unique instructions to create music that will evolve on its own. We also used the system to tie pickup SFX into the musical palette, by specifying which note scales to use for pickup SFX depending on which song was playing.

what the fuck...?

Also, going into New Game+ twice gives you.... Stereoscopy. Seriously. If you have a pair of red/blue glasses, you can play a 3D game folded into 2D back into 3D again. I really want to grab some of those glasses now...

Bastion is awesome. It's high up on my list of games to actually finish.

Fez is as good, or maybe better than Braid. I wish it got more attention.

Alec wrote:Fez is as good, or maybe better than Braid. I wish it got more attention.

Maybe if it was on more platforms, like Steam.

I'm sure that Fez's 360 exclusivity window will be over sometime and Phil Fish will throw it up on steam. It is a really fun and deep game if you are willing to put in the necessary time and brain power required to really see through the extremely simple and almost boring initial platforming and perspective change in order to get to the actual game beneath that.

Yeah I'd check Fez out on Steam.. my 360 is still bricked and I still find myself not really caring.

Braid gained most of it's fame during it's 360 exclusivity period.

I guess that was before the bricks.