Platie – No Silly Hats Required

Fans of Fez are plenty used to having their brains broken, and Platie looks to be trying to do that with the simpler aesthetics of squares and rectangles.

The basic premise of the game is fairly simple: Players control a block that needs to jump up a series of other blocks. The deeper mechanic is that the entire game is 3D, but only displayed in 2D. So in order to navigate the various levels, it is necessary to be able to see the different facets of the 3D world. In Fez , this was accomplished by letting players rotate the world, but in Platie, it’s made even tougher by giving those players three different perspectives on one screen.

Because of this, it becomes a game of swapping quickly from perspective to perspective to find which one will allow the player to progress. It’s a difficult concept to wrap one’s head around, so hopefully that .gif will help.

Weird, right? It takes awhile to understand what’s going on there, but watch the top two for one loop, then watch the bottom third for a second loop. Similar to Fez , the key seems to be not in seeing everything simultaneously, but in seeing the perspective needed to allow one to progress.

Platie was made by Brazilian developer Daniel Marques, and is out now for iOS devices for free, so if it’s at all intriguing, there’s no risk in trying it out. You can learn more about the game from its iTunes page.