Rez Infinite Review (TariqK)
The first time I encountered Rez was in 2002, when I was visiting the Game On exhibition at the Barbican. There were plenty of other examples of games as art at the time, and me and a friend thought they were cool, but the Rez exhibit… we ended up spending over an hour playing the first level and the second. To say it was transformative might be an understatement.
It was the first videogame I ever had played that really pulled me in and absorbed me, if only because of its soundtrack, and at the time it really felt like a mind-altering experience. I didn't have a PS 2 at the time — I was a poor student back then — but I still bought the game disc, and when I returned home only a couple of years later, I tried it out on a cousin's PS2. But the game disc disappeared, and the years went on by, and I forgot about it.
Then I found out that Rez Infinite was on Steam, and I was like, hey, that's cool, I'll wishlist it and buy it when I can. And so, twenty years after seeing this game… I bought it.
There aren't many games that last the march of twenty years, but in my experience the ones that do are the ones that have solid art direction, and do something more than push the cutting edge of photorealism in games. Rez is definitely one of those games, where even the jank and artifacts from the game add into the story. I don't think I could have told you about the art influences and themes in the game 20 years ago, but now, after all these years and experience, I can spot the references and clever tricks that the designers built into each level, and the callbacks, and the art cues.
Lots of games have this problem that their first initial control scheme is the one that's optimised for the game. Not Rez, though. I had always felt frustrated by the lack of response and finesse that you had with the PS2 controllers, and having it be mouse allowed me to move, I felt, at the speed of thought, in ways that I had hoped for when I first played the game. I've finished the core “story” mode right now, and I've yet to try the subsequent modes yet. But I'll get there.
The most telling part of it all was that I played this on the family computer, and my eldest child is sitting behind me, wide-eyed, taking all the scenes of the game in, while I play. Another young person's journey into what video games can do has just started, and I feel like I have Rez to thank for it.