Fez

Fez's invented language can be cracked before the game explains it. Fez hands players a Rosetta stone for its made-up language later on, but some players decoded it earlier through pattern analysis.

This is a knowledge lock: the answer lives in the player's head, so a sharp player can solve it at any time. Mark Brown credits this with creating personal stories, replayability and sequence breaking. "The player can technically answer that question at any point in time."

Only 32 cubes reach the credits; the deepest secrets stay optional. Fez needs just 32 cubes to finish, leaving dozens of anti-cubes and artefacts for players who want to keep digging.

Few players will solve the hardest puzzles, so Fez makes them optional. That way not every player has to beat the trickiest mysteries to see the ending.

Hidden controller codes reveal questions players didn't know to ask. Fez hides secrets behind shoulder-button codes, so players don't realise a whole class of puzzle exists until they stumble on one.

Mark Brown groups this with The Witness's world-drawing reveal and Dark Souls' illusory walls: once one hidden question surfaces, players start asking what else is hidden.

Fez's black monolith shows the pull of one unsolved secret. The black monolith needs a specific sequence of controller inputs. Players only opened it by brute-forcing thousands of combinations in a community project.

The intended way to deduce the sequence was still unknown 12 years after release. Either it is hidden extremely well, or Phil Fish meant to leave one mystery forever unsolved. "The game would always be just a little bit unknowable."

Maps that point toward secrets keep mystery without frustration. Fez's maps point players toward secret areas without revealing how to get there. Mark Brown calls this an even better balance of mystery and accessibility than the first Zelda managed.

"Games like Fez have arguably found even better compromises between mystery with accessibility."

A dead zone camera ignores small moves; a wide zoom hides the offset. Fez keeps an invisible window around the character where it can move without the camera following. The camera shifts only when the player pushes past the window's edge.

The trade-off is that the character sits far off-centre while walking. Fez's camera is zoomed out far enough that this doesn't matter.

Free, instant perspective shifts let players solve puzzles by fiddling. Mark Brown solved many of Fez's perspective puzzles by hammering the rotate trigger until things lined up, without working them out.

He compares it to Breath of the Wild's divine beasts, which can be moved from the map screen at any moment. That speeds play up but makes puzzles solvable by trial and error.