Practically impossible: The quest to decipher Fez's cryptic final puzzle

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.

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. For the rest of the Fez-playing public, unlocking the secrets of the monolith became a project that took a concerted collaborative effort and nearly a full week of focused attention.