The rail shooter is a moribund genre — one that hasn’t even really seen a wave of reclamation indie developers. There’s something inherently archaic about these games, once the ideal vehicle for video game spectacle. They’re usually brief 3D experiences in which the landscape and hazards rush toward you while you pick off as many enemies as you can, aiming for a high score.
Nintendo is looking to revive the genre with Star Fox — a remake of 1997’s Star Fox 64, a hugely enjoyable, approachable blast through an interstellar conflict between anthropomorphic space animals, heavily inspired by Star Wars and retro anime. It’s an odd move by Nintendo, motivated more by the merchandising potential of the characters than a desire for rail shooters to make a comeback, I daresay. But it’s still a welcome spotlight on a thrilling breed of video game that gets little love these days — and that, in its heyday, was often found in the vicinity of the medium’s technological and aesthetic bleeding edge.
Star Fox 64 is definitely one of the best rail shooters ever, but it’s not the very best. On the Switch, you can hunt down the genre’s origins in Sega Ages Space Harrier, an excellent version of the 1985 arcade game. Or try one of its coolest deep cuts in Sin and Punishment, Treasure’s N64 cult classic (available on Nintendo Classics with a Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription). These are absolute classics, but they’re not the apex of the rail shooter form, either.
That honor goes to Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Rez. Published by Sega for the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 in 2002, and playable in a great modernized version on PC and PlayStation today, Rez takes the rail shooter genre’s focus on immersing the player in an audiovisual lightstorm and turns it into something transcendent.
Rez draws its inspirations from club culture, Tron, synaesthesia, early vector-drawn games, music games, the Star Gate sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the abstract art of Wassily Kandinsky. It’s a hallucinatory dive into wireframe cyberspace. On paper, it’s a representation of a hacker (the player) trying to penetrate and debug a network corrupted by overflowing information, and awaken the dormant, godlike intelligence at its center.
Making the activation of a superpowered AI a desirable goal is perhaps not how you would choose to frame this story in 2026. But it doesn’t matter, because Rez‘s power is more metaphorical, metaphysical, even spiritual. You are shooting things, yes, but as you clear the waves of data corruption, your avatar gains more definition and form, transforming from a loose jumble of polygonal planes into a shining human form reminiscent of the Silver Surfer. Rez is nothing less than a quest to regain and then transcend humanity on a quest to find God. As you battle its hazards, you feel less like you’re fighting a war than disassembling one.
The fundamental optimism of Mizuguchi’s project, which began with Rez and has continued in the equally brilliant Lumines and Tetris Effect, lies in music. By timing gaming interactions like shooting or clearing blocks to an insistent techno beat, and linking progress through a stage to the sonic escalation within the track, Mizuguchi orchestrates a euphoric feeling that’s more than just an effect. There’s a deep harmony between doing, seeing, and hearing in these games.
One of Rez‘s masterstrokes is to change the act of shooting from an aggressive hammering of buttons to a slow, rhythmic call-and-response, like breathing. You hold down the fire button, sweep your cursor over enemies, and release it to shoot; your projectiles automatically deconstruct hazards to the beat, detonating them in stabs of melody and percussion, building the song. Some of the game’s trance music is original, and some comes from electronic artists like Coldcut and Adam Freeland, whose slow, churning “Fear” unforgettably soundtracks the game’s astonishing final level.
Rez is a product of its time; it pulses with the clubby hedonism of the turn of the millennium. But it’s also timeless, and it’s definitely not heedless. Who’d have thought you could make a rail shooter mindful, philosophical, and pacifist? There’s nothing else like it.
Rez Infinite is available on Steam, PS4 and PS5, and Meta Quest. The Steam and PlayStation versions also support VR headsets.
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