Fez monolith why

The Monolith puzzle. It confounded players for nearly a week after Fez was released, and ended up being solved by brute force. Surely after all the careful design and five years of development that were put into this game, this puzzle was not meant to be solved in such a way.

I have found a number of threads trying to unearth a solution, but nobody seems to have made any real headway. That's an achievement in itself, but until Wednesday, none of those players had actually been able to complete the game's most difficult puzzle, which involves a black monolith floating inside a hidden underground chamber. Actually, that's not strictly true—a small handful of people had unlocked the monolith's secrets. But those solvers had either stumbled onto the solution without knowing how they had done so, or else a source close to Fez developer Polytron had provided the answer.

For the rest of the Fez -playing public, unlocking the secrets of the monolith became a project that took a concerted collaborative effort and nearly a full week of focused attention. When game designer Trey Reyher reached out for help with the monolith puzzle driving him up the wall, he contacted a friend who had worked on Fez. He received an disheartening reply: "Good luck with that.

It's practically impossible. Reyher had already discovered the first two pieces of a mysterious three-piece, heart-shaped block that didn't appear in the game's official inventory.

He found the first piece by button mashing, which was a bit lucky. The actual solution involves taking a blinking pattern shown by two tiny red dots and converting it first into binary and then into ASCII to get a six-button code. The second piece Reyher had deciphered from a maddeningly cryptic "security question" hidden inside the game. But he despaired at ever finding the key that could unlock the third piece from that mysterious black monolith.

And so a website was formed where players could go and receive instructions for how to help brute force the puzzle into submission. As a result, the total possible number of solutions was calculated and players got to work testing them all out. The only problem? While the red cube lurking in the room had been revealed and finally collected, the fact that no one had been able to discern the hidden logic behind how to solve the puzzle without brute forcing it made the entire affair feel incomplete and unresolved.

With as much passion as they took to trying to figure out how to solve the Black Monolith, players took to trying to imbue the puzzle and its apparent solution with some semblance of meaning. They offered each oather theories and in turn shot them down until one became as close to canon as anything else in the game ever was:.