They likened the game's rotation mechanic to the 2D 3D shifts of Echochrome, Super Paper Mario, and Crush.
Eurogamer Welsh compared the game's "wraparound platforming" to the 80s game Nebulus and described the rotation mechanic as among the console generation's "most unusual technical challenges".
This rotation mechanic reveals new paths through the levels by connecting otherwise inaccessible platforms, and is the basis of Fez puzzles.
1UP.com Parish said that Fez rotation mechanic was deeper than that of Super Paper Mario and not as dependent on M. C. Escher themes as Echochrome.
So as to fit the rotation mechanic, the levels were made tall instead of wide, and the first part of the game was designed to acclimate the player to 2D controls before introducing the 3D element.
GameSpot scored the PC version 7.5 out of 10, stating that while the rotation mechanic "wears thin toward the end of the game," "the increasingly exotic level design manages to keep the good times rolling until the end".
Detailed analysis of the mechanics of crystal rotation shows that the orientations belonging to the sets 〈1 1 0〉//TD and 〈1 1 1〉//TD can rotate between two unstable orientations before a stable orientation is reached.
(According to the laws of mechanics, as the rotation of the earth is retarded, that of the moon must be accelerated, and centrifugal force will carry it farther away).
In this paper, an alternative mechanics based discrete rotation approach for the non-time dependent deflection is developed for FRP reinforced flexural members and which is validated by FRP RC beam tests.
In more advanced treatments of mechanics, where the rotation over a time interval is described, the moment of inertia must be substituted by the tensor that, when properly analyzed, fully determines the characteristics of rotations including precession and nutation.
Another way of putting the same point is to say that, in Newtonian mechanics and special relativity, rotation is "absolute" because the transformations between inertial frames (Galilean or Lorentzian) preserve rotational states.
