How is the Monolith puzzle in Fez supposed to be solved?

Question

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. One would think that after three months, somebody would have figured it out by now. However, those few who have fully completed the game appear to have used the brute-forced solution (or been told said solution by a developer).

My hope is that someone somewhere has figured this out, but I fear that this question will remain unanswered.

Answer 1

A redditor recently solved this here. It turns out that the key to this puzzle was the release date of Fez, 4/13/2012.

If this date is turned into a string of numbers and rearranged using the page order from the tome (15263748), the resulting string is 4011322. This number is then converted into Fez numbers and those fez numbers converted into directions by interpreting the dash in the number as part of the T tetromino (Up, Jump, Right, Right, Left, Down, Down).

Rights and Lefts are then turned into RTs and LTs since Rights and Lefts would cause Fez to move off the magic location. If the pattern of arrows on the map is completed, it would imply that this sequence should be read bottom-up, resulting in a final solution of Down, Down, LT, RT, RT, Jump, Up.

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Answer 2

There is no answer to this question, but there is still a great story behind it:

Since its release last Friday, thousands of players have struggled to untangle the knotty thicket of puzzles hidden deep within Xbox 360 indie title Fez, the 2D-meets-3D puzzle platformer that drove us batty with its obscure stumpers. Since then, only a few hundred have managed to complete enough of the game's challenges to reach the 200 percent (yes, 200 percent) completion threshold.

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.

The monolith puzzle in Fez was so challenging that even those who solved it didn't fully understand how they did so:

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.

The puzzle's difficulty was acknowledged by those involved in the game's development:

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 a disheartening reply: "Good luck with that. It's practically impossible."

The community's efforts to solve the puzzle were extensive and collaborative:

Players congregated in Google Docs and Pastebins around the Web to share their testing strategies. One player even developed a De Brujin graph Web application to drive collaborative testing of tens of thousands of possible solutions.

Ultimately, the puzzle was solved through brute force rather than deciphering:

A poster going by gregSTORM on the Xbox 360 Achievements forums was the first one to cross the finish line. He used a program to generate a list of all the possible solutions, and after entering around 1,300 of them by hand, to his great surprise... he managed to open the monolith.

Despite the anticlimactic solution, some players found value in the process:

Reyher has an even more positive take on the whole Fez-solving experience. "I think the intensity of idea exchange and collaboration within the community was the climax of the game's experience, having turned what could have been a very negative and insulting experience for most players who put a lot of effort into the game's back nine into a positive one."

Answer 3

It's currently unknown, and Polytron (Fez developer) maintains a "no comment" policy on the Black Monolith puzzle:

The Polytron Policy regarding the Black Monolith has always been "no comment" and that continues to be the case

One popular theory among players, and as also suggested by the current top-voted answer, was that the game's April 13, 2012 release date on Xbox 360 was part of the solution. However, Renaud Bédard (Fez programmer) explicitly debunks this idea:

A popular theory for the solution to the Black Monolith puzzle is that the game's release date on Xbox is part of the solution. Sadly, it does not add up.

They go on to explain why this theory doesn't work:

The Xbox 360 FEZ build that shipped was sent to certification on March 18th 2012. We locked down the release date (of April 13th) on March 28th 2012, 10 days after sending off the build. The Black Monolith was not added in a post-release patch, and it was not added to the game last-minute. To be 100% clear, we had no knowledge of the exact launch date when adding the Black Monolith to the game.

This information confirms that the release date couldn't have been part of the intended solution, as the puzzle was already in the game before the release date was set.

While this doesn't provide a direct answer to how the puzzle is supposed to be solved, it does suggest that there is indeed an intended solution that hasn't been discovered yet. The fact that the developers are still maintaining secrecy about the puzzle years after release implies that they believe there's more to uncover.