After almost a decade, Rez Infinite remains gaming’s greatest tease
“If we're using the word ‘prologue,’ obviously something has to come after...”
When Enhance announced its reimagined puzzle game Tetris Effect in 2018, I remember feeling four emotions in quick succession.
Excitement, given the team’s track record of working on some of the game industry’s best music games. Surprise, since the reveal trailer — a brilliant recitation of a Harvard Medical School study — didn’t initially show its hand. Curiosity, for how the song in that trailer managed to successfully pull off a “connected” pun.
And lingering in the back of all that: confusion.
Wasn’t this supposed to be Rez?
Almost two years earlier, Enhance had released Rez Infinite — an updated version of the 2001 rhythmic shooter that Enhance founder Tetsuya Mizuguchi had produced at Sega. The package included virtual reality support and a new stage called Area X, which transformed Rez’s vectors into an ocean of particles and let players fly wherever they wanted. Many who tried it called it the best thing they’d played in VR, with the team’s penchant for fusing visuals and music slotting perfectly into the experiential nature of the new headsets. But it only lasted about 20 minutes.
Like many VR experiments at the time, Area X felt like a prototype for something bigger. And Mizuguchi said as much, referring to the stage as a “prologue” for a future project.
Tetris Effect wasn’t that project, yet it was hard to complain, seeing how well it nailed the idea of a light show puzzle game. It won game of the year awards from Eurogamer and Giant Bomb, and ranked #4 on Polygon's list. It felt like a worthy detour, after which, I figured, Enhance would get back to Rez, or maybe a spiritual successor of some sort.
Then came Humanity, another great puzzle game that had even less of a connection to Rez. Then, in June of this year, Enhance announced the excellent-looking Lumines Arise, the latest in the long-running puzzle series. All along, Mizuguchi has been popping up in interviews, hinting at an Area X follow-up. And each time Enhance has announced a new game, it’s been something else.
It’s now been more than nine years since Rez Infinite released. So when I sat down with Mizuguchi, Rez Infinite art director Takashi Ishihara, and Enhance senior vice president of production and business development Mark MacDonald recently to look back at Rez Infinite, I had one question I couldn’t stop thinking about: At what point should I stop expecting this to happen?