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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.

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    I wouldn't hold my breath on this one. I would bet that most of the people working on it just wanted to finish the game. The fact that the puzzle was most quickly solved by brute force was a pretty disheartening outcome, and few people wanted to continue working on a puzzle that was not known to have a solution. That said, I would also be quite interested in knowing this.
    – murgatroid99
    Jul 16, 2012 at 17:51
  • Out of curiosity by someone who has seen some notes on Fez, but not played it, would you mind expanding a bit on 'brute force'? I can't imagine what that means in a puzzle game context. If you don't want to spoil the brute force solution, maybe you could cite an analogous situation in Portal or a similarly popular puzzle game.
    – Cort
    Aug 19, 2012 at 21:15
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    The answer to the puzzle is a sequence of button presses (This is fairly evident once you get to the point that you're trying to solve this puzzle). Someone put up a website to crowdsource a brute-force solution by trying every possible combination. There would have been 823543 possible combinations, but a Polytron staffer gave a couple hints that reduced the set of solutions to a more reasonable 17k or so.
    – robalan
    Aug 21, 2012 at 15:02
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    @robalan "... more reasonable 17k or so." lol
    – Lemmings19
    Dec 24, 2012 at 6:07

2 Answers 2

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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).

Reading direction

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.

Solution from reddit

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    Interesting - but then the question is, what's the purpose of the poem in the tome, or all that crap hidden in the soundtrack?
    – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft
    Jul 30, 2013 at 23:55
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    Who knows! There could be some other meta-puzzle that nobody has found an answer to, but I haven't read anything about it.
    – robalan
    Jul 31, 2013 at 0:22
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    The problem with this theory is that the developers would have had to know with 100% certainty when the game would be released far in advance of the relase.
    – Swiss
    Sep 14, 2013 at 4:13
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    @Swiss, not really, it could be a variable that is set at build time. If the final build is sent to the publisher before the release date is fixed then this is feasible. Surely XBLA have future games already uploaded and ready to be released at a fixed date in the future.
    – Gareth Davidson
    Oct 1, 2013 at 23:57
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    That's right, a dev confirmed this is not the solution.
    – Glen Wheeler
    May 28, 2021 at 11:39
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There is no answer to this question but still there are great story behind it.

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