Rez is immune to the effects of time. Drenched in style, forged with a Spartan aesthetic, and saturated with melody, Rez was as much of a synesthesia induction apparatus as it was a clever rail shooter. If contemporaries like Starfox 64, Vanark, or Sin and Punishment reduced the player to a cursor furiously in search of a target, Rez’s careful harmony of rhythm and action pushed them into a synchronous sensory overload. Outside of a spiritual sequel in 2010’s Child of Eden, nothing has approach the pinnacle that Rez allowed its players to soar over.
To understand Rez in 2016 requires knowledge of its position in 2001. The architects of Panzer Dragoon combined their talents with Sega’s Tetsuya Mizuguchi and sought to create an experience that fully engulfed the player’s senses. An admiration for Tron and the looming dread of the year 2000 lead to Rez’s skilled visual expression and rejection of fatalistic discourse. Rez’s appeal survives on its exceptional sophistication, but it could have only been made when we all through the world was going to end (and, as for Sega’s place in the hardware business, it really did).
2000’s putative techno-apocalypse bled through Rez’s call to action. Taking place inside a computer network, the player needs to locate and reach an emotionally inconsolable AI and prevent her from shutting down the system. This is performed by scouring through wire-frame corridors filled with facsimiles of historical artifacts and vanquishing obstructive viruses that try to get in the way. Story isn’t a major part of Rez, but it does provide some context to the barrage of visual and sonic information being administered to the senses.
A lean visual style allows Rez’s formidable operation. All five levels feature an escalating series of abstract adversaries punctuated with a colossal boss. Area 2’s techno-stalactites give way to mechanically impossible motorcycles and ominous pink and purple dreadnoughts, and the boss looks like a level of Tempest exploded and gained sentience. Area 1’s rogue spacecraft and Area 4’s vector-based, shape-shifting running man are also iconic, but Area 5 endures as the star of Rez’s show. The shift from black to white, the brief narrative highlighting transitions, and the glimpses up (and down) the evolutionary chain can, under the right circumstances, qualify as an ethereal experience.
Separated from its visual proficiency, Rez also happens to be a pretty good game. On a base level, it follows the model established by other rail shooters. Your avatar follows a tight path while you control a cursor that can fire at or lock onto up to eight targets. Enemies assault the screen in recognizable patterns, and your overt goal is to obliterate them before any of their projectiles hit you. Health can be collected and your physical form can be advanced, but taking damage devolves the player until death. Each area has ten short levels marked by cube the player must find and target in order to advance.
There are a few ways to go about playing Rez. The first is to be as efficient as possible; fire upon everything that crosses the screen, hit the level cubes as soon as they appear, and covet health pickups. This style prevents the player from dying (important!) and generally makes the game go by quickly. Another way is to focus on Rez’s scoring mechanics. Locking onto multiple enemies and dispatching them simultaneously is a riskier style of play, but leads to a bigger score when the level wraps up. Trying to pull this off on bosses is especially challenging, given their proclivity for filling the screen with nefarious shards death and other threatening projectiles.
Of course, a more substantial way to play Rez is to forget about (or I suppose master) enemy patterns and sync your action with its music. Pushing the fire button and locking onto enemies adds its own percussive effect the Rez’s soundtrack, providing the player with a role in its formation. Normal play will fit in the natural soundtrack well enough, but timing your shots and feeling the rhythm of the game aids in the potential for transcendence. In any case it’s difficult not to hear the soothing keys in either Area 2’s “Protocol Rain,” or Area 4’s pounding “Rock is Sponge,” and synchronize your action with Rez’s movement.
Everything currently written was true of Rez when it was released in 2001. The same also applies to Rez HD, 2008’s visually updated release modified to present Rez in high definition. Rez Infinite, while still much of the same game, presents Rez to 2016 and to virtual reality. While it’s possible to experience the entirety of Rez Infinite on a modern television, its latest incarnation has been constructed with PlayStation VR in mind. Rez, a game that takes place in virtual space and feels consumed in the metaphor of visually hacking a system, has an obvious and comfortable home inside of a VR headset.
Rez Infinite carries two different styles of play into PSVR. The first is meant for people new to the VR experience, which I can only assume means there are fewer hard shifts of the game’s camera. The other allows for a wider range of motion through the player’s gaze. You can still move the targeting cursor around at will, but it simultaneously moves with the direction that your head turns. This not only means quicker targeting of enemies, but also the ability to look behind you and pick off approaching (or passed by) foes.
On my first round, I found Rez in VR tough to deal with. I was missing health upgrades left and right, and unable to parse the visual language of navigating a game I had basically memorized through a different medium. My only previous experience with VR was one session with an HTC Vive, and I simply wasn’t ready for what Rez Infinite was trying to sell me. Time, of course, helps, and before long playing Rez in VR was as natural as sitting next to my television and blazing through each area.
Being in Rez’s world feels comfortable and appropriate. Some VR games search for impact by scaring the shit out of the player or through other fleeting gimmicks, but immersion in Rez’s grandeur—especially with an impressive set of headphones—is and has always been driven by a desire to overwhelm the player’s senses. Rez Infinite’s sleek visuals have seen additional levels of refinement, but even its modest construction looks as clean and inspired today as it did in 2001. There still isn’t anything that looks or acts like Rez.
And then there is Area X. Created especially for Rez Infinite, Area X is both an extension of and logical point of progression to Rez’s original five areas. Area X abandons the linear and wireframe trapping of Rez and transitions its aesthetic into a radiant, particle heavy wonderland of personal freedom and joyous eruption. The rails are gone, allowing the player to fly through the level at the whims of their own ambition. New pulsating music and a myriad of extravagant creatures are virtual fireworks for the player to enjoy and explore, and Area X’s open design lends itself to a variety of styles and discoveries. Area X is a competent embrace of VR technology, and its only sin is that we can’t have an entire game like this at the inception of PlayStation VR.
It is possible to play Rez Infinite and only see an amusing and brief rail shooter. I do not understand that. I could be in-the-moment and prone to hyperbole, but Rez has to be more than its basic construction. Time has made Rez special and allowed it to enter the pantheon of games that are significant to me. To see one of my favorite games receive this sort of treatment—cleaned textures, a full virtual reality conversion, brand new content that exceeds the spirit of the original—feels like a compliment paid toward a personal memory. It’s a challenge to even think of a game in the polygonal era that could accept and fulfill a similar transformation. By its architecture and through its nature, there isn’t a time when Rez won’t be beautiful. PlayStation VR, as it happens now, is the best way to experience it in 2016.
