Video games weren’t always so easy. Players who know only the current generation of consoles must think of their favorite games as gentle, kindhearted, almost mothering in their ministrations — adapting themselves to the needs of the gamer, serving up big shiny arrows or straightforward explanatory text when things get confusing, and just generally showering kisses and encouragement every time someone skins a knee.


Not all that long ago games were exacting, punishing, cruel. For more than a decade the economics of the arcade age — kill a player, get a quarter — influenced the spirit of the first games that were designed to be played at home, on televisions, even though they were sold for one fixed, all-you-can-play price. Three lives and you’re out. Quickly.


In a creative version of Stockholm syndrome, now that the generation that grew up playing these games is making games of its own, difficulty is seeing a resurgence, especially among indie games: those built by small teams, or even individuals, at independent developers that work outside of the industry’s studio system and its multimillion-dollar budgets. Many of these games make a fetish of how impossible they are. And Fez, a brilliant, intricate new game created by a two-person team in Montreal, might be the most impenetrable of them all.


In “Indie Game: The Movie,” a documentary that opens on Friday in New York, Phil Fish, the game’s designer (he worked with Renaud Bédard, the game’s sole programmer), says his first video-game memories are of playing Super Mario Bros., the Legend of Zelda and Tetris. Fez, his tribute to 1980s gaming, is lovingly, almost excessively, devoted to the golden age of Nintendo, from its chunky, lo-fi art style to its numerous homages to those three titans of Mr. Fish’s youth.


Fez took Mr. Fish and Mr. Bédard five years to build. A prototype won an award for visual excellence from the Independent Games Festival — in 2008. Finally — news that broke too late for the documentarians who chronicled Mr. Fish’s failure to meet numerous development milestones — Fez became available on the Xbox downloadable games marketplace, for about $10, last month.


Mr. Fish is a Quentin Tarantino of 8-bit gaming, prodigiously quoting from the pop culture of his childhood (in this case, the Nintendo Entertainment System, rather than blaxploitation films). The oddly shaped blocks from Tetris can be seen everywhere in Fez: on the walls, on the ground, on signposts, scrawled on chalkboards, even in the constellations in the sky. Gomez, Fez’s protagonist, beams with joy, adorably, when he finds an important item in a treasure chest, much like Link, the hero of Zelda. But it is to Super Mario Bros. that Fez owes its greatest debts. For starters, there are mushroom levels, moving platforms on rails and an underground world that Gomez reaches by descending through a well that looks very much like a pipe.


Somehow all of this feels inventive rather than derivative. Initially, Fez appears to be about Gomez’s discovery that his two-dimensional universe is actually three-dimensional, as he uses his fez — thus the title — to reveal that squares are in fact cubes. The gameplay is always side-scrolling in two dimensions, but Gomez can rotate his cube-universe so that he traverses different planes — the flat surfaces of the same cube — to make his leaping less difficult. This Escher-like manipulation of the universe is not all that confusing on the screen, nor is it typically challenging. When Gomez falls to his death, the game generously places him on the most recent platform he stood on, rather than returning him to the start of a level or a checkpoint.


Fez’s difficulty — its status as a “Finnegans Wake” of video games — does not come from Gomez’s ostensible quest, which is to collect 32 golden cubes for some blah-blah-save-the-universe reason. Finding the cubes is sort of a ruse on Mr. Fish’s behalf to get you to check out every corner of his densely constructed universe so you will begin to want to unspool the complex game that is layered atop Gomez’s childlike adventure.