\*WHO ARE YOU ?*

My comfort. Ever since I learned how to emulate, I've returned to this title with semi-regularity just so I can trip through it again.

\*DON'T COME ANY CLOSER !*

Rez is like if Char Davies' 1995 art installation called "Osmose" was a shmup. Experimental explorations through 3D spaces that, while primitive, are teaming with vibes, life, and anthropologic influences. There's such a grit to it all, it's like decoding the earth's DNA, weaving it into strings to pluck, and playing along to the universe's heartbeat. Did you know that all the data on Rez's PS2 disk amounted to 91mb? That's how much a soul weighs.

\*WHY ?*

You could definitely say it peaks early by starting with the best level - its music is incredible, the escalation in instrumentation and aesthetic complexity is unmatched, you can't power up enough to become one of the forms with annoying sound effects. It's worth playing the slightly less spectacular middle levels just to eventually hear Fear is the Mindkiller again. Never dull, always reinventing itself and finding new ways to overwhelm the player, enemies and patterns that never show up across levels - it's a journey.
The Area X level they introduced for the Rez Infinite port is welcome optional content that isn't hurting anything. Many people love it, I'm kinda nonplussed. Empty void of Unreal Engine particles and none of the progressive trance choons that keep my heart bumpin.

\*AREN'T YOU AFRAID ?*

Still about as visually spectacular as games ever got!!! This is up there with Zone of the Enders 2 for Apex Graphics.

\*SAVE ME .....*

The original Rez has been on my gaming bucket list for close to 20 years. 12 year old me made a mental note to check it out after Jane Pinckard’s famous article about the Trance Vibrator lead to the video games message board I frequented in 2002 exploding in incandescent rage that someone would sexually defile a video games peripheral. As a result of this, Rez lead to me discovering what vibrators and other sex toys were, so I guess you could say this game changed my life two decades before I even got a chance to play it.

Back in 2002, video streaming wasn’t quite a thing yet, and you could forget about checking out video game OSTs that weren’t in midi format. So over the next couple of years, descriptions of Rez took on a hyper-imaginative form in my mind... it wasn’t one of those games like Super Mario Sunshine or Metal Gear Solid 2 that you could reasonably picture in your mind’s eye, so I had all kinds of childish visions of what a “transcendent” game that could give women orgasms would play like. But alas! I never found Rez in my local game shops, and it eventually faded from my memory.

Despite making a specific point of wanting to play this game, I’ve actually played every Mizuguchi game apart from this one in the intervening time since 2002. As such, playing Rez post-Tetris Effect, Child of Eden, Space Channel 5, et al kinda feels like going back to discover a favourite band or director’s sophomore work after already experiencing all the stuff that it went on to influence and evolve into. Not necessarily disappointing, but too coloured by expectations of what you know an artist can do at the heights of their talent and resources.

I love a lot of what the original game is doing, but trying to mix intense gameplay with A/V spectacle that doesn’t always follow a coherent design language left me kinda frustrated at times. Which floating objects are gonna kill me? Which ones are just set-dressing for me to pass idle moments on the journey with? It sucks to lose a 20 minute flow because you didn’t realise that the pretty beam of light that dipped off screen 5 seconds prior was actually a game-ending death-bolt. It’s a problem that other Mizuguchi games have had (Tetris Effect is guilty of throwing its most intense flurries of technicolour sparks in your face right as you’re trying to pull off a T-Spin at TGM speeds), but it feels more pronounced here because the core gameplay is relatively slight and time-consuming. Having to retry the lengthy Area 5 again lifted the hood on the technical aspects of what should have been a transcendent experience (and I don’t wanna hear that California Soul sample for the thirtieth time!!), but for the most part I can forgive these wrongdoings because this is a 20 year old PS2 game that could easily pass for something made in the past few years. Not quite the transcendence I hoped for, but still something special.

It’s almost as if Mizuguchi and his team had the exact same thoughts as me, because the Infinite’s all-new Area X mode sets out to directly address all the complaints I made above. It definitely favours Experience over Challenge, but who can blame them when it feels this good? Now THIS is a game I’d happily play with a vibrator down my pants! It’s beautiful!

Cool soulful rail shooter. I love the cyberspace aesthetic and the stages have a lot of cool visuals to enjoy, especially in VR. But while it is an amazing visual experience, the gameplay aspect is pretty simple and repetitive. I would say Gal Gun is more fun as a rail shooter. Area X adds a fun spin on the gameplay by giving you freedom of movement but it's more fantastical and lacks the oldschool cyberspace appeal I was fond of in the original levels. The music is also pretty rad and fits the levels very well. The most annoying aspect of the game for me was I could only use my left VR controller despite being right-handed.

Rez is a rail shooter that draws you in with its Y2K as fuck visuals and soundtrack. After it lulls you into a false sense of security it starts to beat you over the head with themes of reincarnation and self-actualization. It's cool as hell.

The new content in this relase (Area X) completetly misses the mark on what makes the original game so compelling. It gives you full 3D control, drops the story, and goes for a completely different aesthetic. Luckily, that new aesthetic is drop dead gorgeous, but I still wish it stuck more to the original.

Amazing game overall, really cannot wait to play it in VR someday.

Difficult to put synesthesia magic into the right words. All I'd be doing is describing pictures, attempting to make impressive in letters the evocative audiovisual experience. I can point to the threads that connect together into this technological celebration of culture, life, etc. I could point out that it's honestly a pretty solid attentive rail shooter in its own right (when I first played it baked I was so bad that it was honestly detrimental to the experience lol). My real only criticism is that it's deceptively harder than it looks to where sometimes there's just too much visual information on screen really!! Go play it! It's short!