Star Fox remakes the second-best rail shooter ever. Rez is the best

Rez draws its inspirations from club culture, Tron, synaesthesia, early vector-drawn games, music games, the Star Gate sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the abstract art of Wassily Kandinsky. It’s a hallucinatory dive into wireframe cyberspace. On paper, it’s a representation of a hacker (the player) trying to penetrate and debug a network corrupted by overflowing information, and awaken the dormant, godlike intelligence at its center.

Making the activation of a superpowered AI a desirable goal is perhaps not how you would choose to frame this story in 2026. But it doesn’t matter, because Rez‘s power is more metaphorical, metaphysical, even spiritual. You are shooting things, yes, but as you clear the waves of data corruption, your avatar gains more definition and form, transforming from a loose jumble of polygonal planes into a shining human form reminiscent of the Silver Surfer. Rez is nothing less than a quest to regain and then transcend humanity on a quest to find God. As you battle its hazards, you feel less like you’re fighting a war than disassembling one.

The fundamental optimism of Mizuguchi’s project, which began with Rez and has continued in the equally brilliant Lumines and Tetris Effect, lies in music. By timing gaming interactions like shooting or clearing blocks to an insistent techno beat, and linking progress through a stage to the sonic escalation within the track, Mizuguchi orchestrates a euphoric feeling that’s more than just an effect. There’s a deep harmony between doing, seeing, and hearing in these games.

One of Rez‘s masterstrokes is to change the act of shooting from an aggressive hammering of buttons to a slow, rhythmic call-and-response, like breathing. You hold down the fire button, sweep your cursor over enemies, and release it to shoot; your projectiles automatically deconstruct hazards to the beat, detonating them in stabs of melody and percussion, building the song. Some of the game’s trance music is original, and some comes from electronic artists like Coldcut and Adam Freeland, whose slow, churning “Fear” unforgettably soundtracks the game’s astonishing final level.

Rez is a product of its time; it pulses with the clubby hedonism of the turn of the millennium. But it’s also timeless, and it’s definitely not heedless. Who’d have thought you could make a rail shooter mindful, philosophical, and pacifist? There’s nothing else like it.

Rez Infinite is available on Steam, PS4 and PS5, and Meta Quest. The Steam and PlayStation versions also support VR headsets.