The rail shooter genre, once a staple of arcade spectacle, has largely faded into obscurity, rarely seeing a resurgence even from indie developers. These games, characterized by fast-paced 3D environments rushing towards the player as they pick off enemies for high scores, once represented the pinnacle of technological and aesthetic achievement in gaming.
Nintendo's recent remake of Star Fox 64, originally released in 1997, brings renewed attention to this niche. The game, a vibrant interstellar conflict featuring anthropomorphic animals, draws heavily from Star Wars and retro anime. While the remake may be more driven by merchandising opportunities than a grand revival of the genre, it nonetheless serves as a welcome spotlight on a thrilling and underappreciated style of game.
However, Star Fox 64, despite its quality, does not hold the title of the genre's absolute best. Titles like Sega Ages Space Harrier and Treasure's N64 cult classic Sin and Punishment offer excellent, albeit older, examples of the rail shooter. Yet, neither reaches the apex of what the genre can achieve.
That distinction belongs unequivocally to Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Rez. First released in 2002 for the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2, and now available in a modernized version for PC and PlayStation, Rez transforms the rail shooter's core immersion into something genuinely transcendent. Its influences are vast, drawing from club culture, Tron, synaesthesia, early vector graphics, music games, the Star Gate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the abstract art of Wassily Kandinsky. The result is a hallucinatory journey through wireframe cyberspace, depicting a hacker's infiltration of a corrupted network to awaken a central intelligence.
While the narrative framing of activating a superpowered AI might feel dated in 2026, Rez's true power lies in its metaphorical and spiritual depth. As players shoot through waves of corrupted data, their avatar evolves from a simple polygonal form into a shining, human-like figure. Rez becomes a quest for regaining and transcending humanity, a journey to find a form of enlightenment rather than engaging in a traditional war. The act of playing feels less like combat and more like disassembling a complex system.
Mizuguchi's optimistic approach, evident also in Lumines and Tetris Effect, is rooted in music. By synchronizing gameplay actions—shooting, clearing enemies—with an insistent techno beat and escalating sonic landscapes, Rez orchestrates a euphoric synergy between doing, seeing, and hearing. The game's masterstroke is reframing shooting from an aggressive act into a rhythmic call-and-response. Holding down the fire button and sweeping the cursor over targets before releasing initiates automatic fire, with projectiles destroying enemies in time with the music, building the song with each detonation. Some of the trance music is original, while other tracks come from artists like Coldcut and Adam Freeland, whose work unforgettably soundtracks the game's climactic final level.
Rez is a product of its time, pulsing with the club culture of the millennium's turn, yet it remains timeless. It is a rail shooter that is simultaneously mindful, philosophical, and almost pacifist, offering an experience unlike any other. Rez Infinite is available on Steam, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Meta Quest, with Steam and PlayStation versions supporting VR headsets.