FEZ vs Dying Light
When comparing FEZ vs Dying Light, the Slant community recommends FEZ for most people. In the question“What are the best games on Linux?” FEZ is ranked 29th while Dying Light is ranked 66th. The most important reason people chose FEZ is:
The core mechanic of FEZ is the ability to spin the world around in 3D, and then traverse and interact with the resulting terrain in 2D. This allows you to experience navigation puzzles that are rarely found in any other game.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Clever 2D rotation game mechanic
The core mechanic of FEZ is the ability to spin the world around in 3D, and then traverse and interact with the resulting terrain in 2D. This allows you to experience navigation puzzles that are rarely found in any other game.
Pro Brilliant puzzles
Fez has some deviously hard puzzles and mysteries that will require gathering clues from around the world to solve them.
Pro Mysterious world with lots of depth
FEZ goes beyond just being a great puzzle platformer. It also has a very clever storyline and game world with a mysterious bygone civilization that fits perfectly with the mysterious puzzles of the game.
Pro Charming graphics and world
The characters are interesting and expressive and the world they inhabit varies between vibrant forests and villages, foreboding caves, rainy cityscapes, and more.
Pro Great atmospheric soundtrack
Soft synth sounds mixed with chiptunes makes for an enjoyable soundtrack that evokes a feeling of nostalgia while creating a fitting atmosphere that complements the graphics.
Pro Fluid parkour movement
The main protagonist is capable of scaling buildings, jumping over obstacles and vaulting over zombies with ease making traversing the open world city a lot more enjoyable.
Pro Expansive weapon-crafting system
There are blueprints found throughout the gameworld that can be used to modify existing weapons in a wide variety of ways by adding various elements to them and creating weapons such as enemy seeking grenades, exploding throwing stars, and makeshift bats with nails through them.
Pro Satisfying combat
The combat is impactful, visceral and offers a great deal of variety in terms of available weapons and different enemy types. It presents a reasonable amount of challenge that is rewarding to overcome and offers multiple ways of emerging victorious in each encounter.
Pro Enjoyable co-operative multiplayer
Dying light features up to four player LAN and online co-op.
Pro Rewarding side-missions
There's a wide variety of side-quests and a large chunk of them are multi-part adventures with great storytelling.
Cons
Con Minimal direction
The lack of clear direction + the mysteries of the foreign writing alphabet and numeric systems may overwhelm players who got in expecting a simple & cute platformer game about a white dude with a red hat (a traditional Ottoman hat, which is called a "fez").
Con Pen and paper absolutely required for full completion
There is a lot of backtracking and so, you need to keep a pen and paper near you to take notes, because you might need something very important later on. For some people this might be a fun killer.
Con Not metroidvania
Nothing in the form of powerups,. this is a puzzle game - not a metroidvania.
Con Very limited depth
The core gameplay loop of "jump until stuck, then rotate" is boring and repetitive within the first hour. Aside from this perspective-shifting mechanic, the game does not have much to offer.
Con Limited button mapping support on keyboard
FEZ has a couple of preset control schemes to choose from, but the buttons can't have functions assigned individually.
Con Phil Fish made it
Phil Fish has had a long rap sheet of being incredibly arrogant and toxic in his behavior, purchasing this game is an implicit endorsement of this kind of behavior.
Con Guess-and-check instead of intuitive puzzles
Unlike other great puzzle games like Portal or Braid, many of the levels in Fez are unpredictable. You can't just look at the map and predict exactly what to do. You have to guess and check, and not all of the results are intuitive. While guess-and-check puzzles works well for games like The Witness, it's really tedious in a game like Fez.
Con Loads of backtracking
The world is an intertwined maze that rely on specific portals to travel between. Since the entire game revolves around locating cubes -- a minimum of 32 cubes are required to reach the game's ending (64 cubes and "anti-cubes" exist in total). A considerable amount of backtracking is needed to locate the needed cubes; which are intentionally difficult to find and acquire.
Con Slow gameplay
Navigation isn't quick, and each missed jump can make ascending an area feel like a laborious chore.
Con Frequent crashes on PC
PC version of the game has stability issues. Luckily, FEZ autosaves often so no much progress is lost when the game crashes.
Con Poor VR UI
Things such as subtitles, instructions, menus, prompts, etc are hard to see clearly.
Con VR has a downgraded visual experience
VR version of the game is low fidelity and introduces visual glitches that the standard version doesn't have.
Con Poor plot and characters
The story is nothing new with many elements that are too familiar at this point. A Reluctant hero and a cold government agent mixed with a plot that can bee seen from miles away points to a lack of imagination while trying to create a game for the masses.
Con Poor multithreading
Sadly Dying Light does not do multi-threading very well which results in low framerates. For a modern game that is to be played on consoles with 8 cores or PCs that also have multiple cores, to not take advantage of proper multi-threading is pretty mind boggling. Really it just comes down to laziness, something that is not new to Techland and their poorly optimized ports.
Con Enabling VR support isn't straightforward
Enabling VR support requires editing config files. Instructions can be found here.
Con VR may cause motion sickness
In addition to some minor persistence issues, there are some sensory information mismatch issues created by the in-game characters movements and players stationary position that can easily induce nausea. The issue is a lot more prominent during cut-scenes that take the control away from the player completely.