Rez

Description

Sega’s United Game Artists under Tetsuya Mizuguchi presented Rez, a game that casts you as a hacker diving into a vast abstract network to awaken a self-aware AI named Eden. The game unfolds across five areas each with its own evolving soundtrack and visual theme. As you lock onto enemies and fire, every shot and explosion triggers musical cues that layer into the background track, creating a seamless blend of action and audio. The further you progress, the richer and more complex the music becomes, turning each stage into an interactive trance track.

The Dreamcast version delivers smooth, stylized 3D environments inspired by early computer graphics and the art of Wassily Kandinsky, with bosses that morph and pulse in time with the beat. Between stages, cryptic text fragments hint at Eden’s existential crisis, giving the abstract journey a narrative spine without breaking its flow. Though it launched late in the Dreamcast’s life and sold modestly, Rez became a cult classic praised for its hypnotic audiovisual design and its ambition to make players feel the music as much as play the game.

Unfortunately sold off my PAL version which is no doubt rarer today. Playing this back in 2001 in the dark, through the VGA Box connected to a top-end Trinitron and similar tier headphones certainly was an experience.