Rayze Review

I am a sucker for an indie game with a good concept. I find that the successful indie games of today are the soulless billion-dollar AAA franchises of tomorrow, so definitely drink deep of the fun while they are still unique and free range. RAYZE is one such beast, roaming free on open fields of innovation – describing itself as an…aim racer’?

The games store page actually uses the phrase ‘genre-defying hyper-paced music-filled first-person AIM RACER’ as a descriptor, which I am thankful for – I’d have struggled to come up with something quite as apt. For the layman, it is a game where you propel yourself forward by clicking on highlighted objects, gaining speed and having to make microsecond quick decisions on where you should be heading next – all while managing your velocity and trying not to have a surreal high-speed collision.

On paper, it’s hard to flesh out this description of the game in a way that gives it credit. Its entirety is played with your mouse buttons, with the most critical element being accuracy as you make narrow hits on rapidly approaching tether shapes. Every clicked shape equals velocity, and your trajectory will be changed to now bee-line to your last clicked item. If you are not careful enough to find your next mark, you now need to accept an impending crash – or deploy the shameful act of braking to perhaps slow down and buy more time to seek another clickable. Playing safely like this can lead to your downfall, because the game utilises a momentum meter as a way to make sure people do not simply drift casually to the finish line of each course. It’s fiendishly simple and delightfully difficult at the same time.

In reality the game fits snugly in the oddly specific genre of ‘Aim Trainer’, serving as a tool to better develop the snap-to reflexes you may need when next you hit up Warzone, or if you are speed running Monkey Island. It will actively work to test your innate (and possibly somewhat taken for granted) skill at the age-old task of ‘click the thing’, while delighting both your eyes and ears with aesthetic lovelies.

If you are not careful enough to find your next mark, you now need to accept an impending crash

The ornamental drippings of the game do well to obscure its sinister purpose – it is testing your mechanical skill, after all – by way of neon colours, surreal environments and positively THUMPING music. The music in particular took me off guard, as the opening beats of the first level had me thinking that maybe my active clicking to achieve velocity may have a rhythm component. Going in blind, my instincts conjured some Beat Rider behaviours, and my first couple minutes were self-sustained confusion as I realised I was clearly on the wrong path.

Instead I realised the music is a focusing tool – the songs are all the kind of energetic tracks I use when I need to focus and get a task done, and letting them nest in the right areas of my mind gave me a zen-like calm to assess the savagely contrasted landscape and mark my next prey – brightly coloured shapes, ripe for the clicking.

Visually, the game is incredibly distinct. Special care and attention is leveraged to make sure that the impossible environments feel habitable, but not hard to comprehend. Quite often you will be staring down a void, home to a myriad of brutally edged shapes, with the odd brightly coloured wotzit nested among them. Herein lies the primary challenge – identifying which way could be considered forward in a realm of everywhere is an option. This is compounded more so later in the game, when a loading tip makes special mention that you may need to pay special attention to UP and DOWN.

While the only inputs for the game are left and right mouse click, it does not mean the game is bereft of mechanics. Quirks in the environment and the interactive nature of your click-speeders are drip fed along the game’s odd narrative of a rookie learning to race. While most of these are intuitive, such as introducing moving elements or clicked elements that vanish once touched – on occasion the spike in difficulty can be a little jarring. About midway through the game I was introduced to moving barriers that had an absurdly low margin for error – I immediately went from finishing a course in four or five attempts, to simply being walled hard. It was enough to actually prompt me to leave the game for a few days and build up the confidence to try again – I had been aggressively humbled.

I since conquered the section, and later viewed a YouTube video that demonstrates how absurdly easy it apparently is. WHATEVER.

Final Thoughts

The beauty of Rayze is its potential – the released copy of the game glances over what it could truly accomplish, but that initial purchase also comes with a promise that more is coming. This breakneck lightshow is yours to conquer, and once you have truly tested and refined your mettle – look to the horizon for what challenges may come.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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