“For unlimited shurikens, set the number of shurikens on the Options screen to 0 and wait about 20 seconds. The zero will turn into an infinity symbol, giving you an unlimited number of shurikens.”
Revenge of Shinobi was my first exposure to the concept of infinity. I’d probably played games before that included some sort of cheat to activate unlimited lives, but here, tied to the symbol I’d refer to as ‘the sideways eight’ for almost as long as child-me pronounced ‘genre’, ja-near, I started to grasp the idea of something that was measureless, bottomless, endlessly replenishing.
Rez always carried with it a sense of awe that inadvertently tapped into the idea of a cyclical, unbroken experience. The ‘story’ itself is of course finite; its first four stages each punctuated by a boss, and its final area closed by a credit roll. However, Rez has never been about this particular compartmentalised journey.
Rez is an experience that has lived inside me in some way since I first picked it up for the PlayStation 2 in 2002. At first, its slim length made me feel disappointed. In my young teens I was drawn in by its aesthetic, but felt let down by how quickly I could finish the traditional campaign. I beat each stage, and that was that, with Area 5 the only part of the trip that gave me trouble. I traded the game in, and largely forgot about it, aside from stumbling upon the occasional glowing editorial online in the early days of the Wild Wild Web. I picked up a replacement copy, played it through a few more times and traded it in - gone again, but this time not quite forgotten.
Years later, with the game’s HD release on the Xbox 360 in 2008, I hopped in again, but this time was able to understand something more of what exactly Rez was, is and continues to be. I had remembered some of the enemy patterns, how to take down the guardians of each zone without taking a hit, the ebb and flow of the soundtrack. Rez was embedded, the thump of the EDM backing somehow able to awaken memories of 6 years prior. The added scope of playing the game at 1080p, spread out across the width of a digital canvas I couldn’t have imagined as a child made it feel as if these stages spread out far beyond my periphery, undulating and evolving around the player avatar in the same way that space expands and exists far beyond our puny comprehension.
I started playing Rez more regularly. At least a few times a year for the next half decade I would play through a number of Direct Assault runs: all five stages back to back, and for my money the purest way to experience the game. Then I’d start exploring each stage in more detail using Score Attack, as well as placing the soundtrack under more scrutiny through the Beyond mode audio modifiers. There’s an adage that when you get good at a game like Tetris or similar you begin to make decisions on auto-pilot; response times narrowing as you play using muscle memory rather than in a traditional reactive feedback loop. Rez achieves something beyond even this, your actions not just in your fingers and hands, but rather in a whole body and mind response. Rez deals, narratively, with sentient AI, life, death and new beginnings. Themes of evolution, enlightenment, elucidation are there not just in story, but for the player. Rez is a transcendental game.
Which brings us to Rez Infinite, likely the final variant of Mizuguchi’s defining work. The jump from widescreen visuals, to a full 360 degree virtual space when played using PSVR makes the play space feel liberatingly free despite still being based around linear, rail led paths. No-one could play using Sony’s headset and then argue that the original ‘flat’ release is better. No contest. No competition. This is the best version of what was already one of the best games. The sense of depth, speed, being and organic belonging in what should feel utterly alien and divorced from reality is unparalleled in gaming, VR or otherwise.
If Rez always had the ability to get under your skin, Infinite is something else entirely. Once you enter the synesthetic world, both mentally, and physically by lowering the headset over your eyes, there can be no more separation. VR and Infinite are a perfect combination, a marriage of ideas separated all these years by technology rather than vision.
In play or in reflection, Rez truly is infinite. The rapid fire of Joe Musashi may have introduced me to the beauty of the unbroken loops of the ouroboros, but it is Rez Infinite that expands the concept. Maths and science takes our base understanding of the world and iterates down infinitesimally in a complex pyramid of interaction. Rez travels the opposite direction, refining the core to an ever-sharper apex.
Caverns measureless to man; an experience quite unlike any other.
