Rez Infinite

I put headphones on before I even touched the controller, because someone warned me years ago that Rez played at low volume is Rez half-experienced. They were right. Tetsuya Mizuguchi's synesthesia project, originally born on Dreamcast and PS2, arrives on PC as Rez Infinite, and the care in this port is palpable from the first wireframe corridor of Area 1. The premise is spare and deliberately cryptic: you are a hacker-entity threading through a deteriorating AI system called Eden, riding invisible rails through five cyberspace zones, locking onto enemies with a reticle and releasing grouped homing shots that ping, thud, and bloom in precise time with the techno soundtrack. Your gunfire is the percussion. The music builds with your accuracy. Mess up your targeting chain and the track thins out. Get into a rhythm and the whole system breathes with you. Areas 1 through 5 are the original game remastered, and the PC version gives you unrestricted resolution and roughly double the texture detail of prior editions. The wireframe aesthetic holds up surprisingly well at high resolution, though anyone who grew up on a CRT playing the PS2 original might notice that the low-fi grit has been sanded away. Bosses are the genuine highlights: elaborate, transforming constructs that demand you learn their patterns while the music swells around you, and the Overdrive power-up, which detonates a screen-clearing burst, lands at exactly the right moments to feel earned rather than cheap. The core loop is simple by design, but that simplicity is load-bearing. Pull at the thread and you find score-chasing, hidden items tucked into each zone, and multiple difficulty settings that reframe the same corridors as endurance tests. A single run of the main game takes under two hours, and whether that registers as "tight and intentional" or "thin on content" is entirely personal. The game has always split people that way. Then there is Area X. Built fresh in Unreal Engine 4 and visually distinct from the wireframe main game, it abandons the rails entirely and lets you float freely through particle-dense environments, steering toward enemies while glowing shapes scatter into indigo clouds on impact. It is brief, somewhere around fifteen minutes, and critics from multiple outlets have used words like "transcendent" while others have called it an agonising proof of concept that leaves you wanting a full game that was never made. Both reactions are fair. What it does is show exactly what a modern Rez built around free movement and current hardware could feel like, and Mizuguchi himself has described it as a prototype for a conceptual third entry in his synesthesia trilogy. Play it without spoilers if you can. On the VR question: the PC version supports HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and the reception there has been divided. Some reviewers found the main game's on-rails structure strangely flat in a headset, closer to a large monitor than true immersion. Others found Area X in VR overwhelming in the best sense. Playing without a headset is a completely valid choice, and the desktop version at 4K is genuinely lovely, though critics have noted it feels slightly "neutered" compared to the headset experience. The honest answer is that your enjoyment scales with your tolerance for the game's single-mindedness. It does one thing, does it with total conviction, and asks you to meet it there.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Rez Infinite.