REZ PLZ Review: Live, Die, Platform, Repeat

In what is informally called the “splatformer,” player characters are expected to die numerous times through harrowing levels designed for trial-and-error. For REZ PLZ by Long Neck Games, death is not only an expectation but a requirement. This is a game that plays with the video game-y concept of respawning—though instead of presenting some sort of existential primer on impermanence, it comes off as a grisly buddy comedy.

Two magic-wielding brothers will be traversing past spike beds, pendulums, killer bees, and a wide variety of instakilling obstacles. But as players will find out in this co-op game, they won’t get anywhere without a corpse handy. With resurrection scrolls in hand, the brothers will have to purposely self-harm to solve platforming puzzles: perhaps one brother will drop on the bed of spikes to be used as a platform; pendulums can cut one brother in half to use on two pressure sensors; killer bees will turn one brother into a giant swollen ball for the other to use as a floatation device; and so on. 

REZ PLZ is morbidly creative—albeit more morbid than creative. And the plethora of technical bugs certainly doesn’t help.

Arcan and Zeph’s Excellent Adventure

Apprentice wizards Arcan and Zeph are a couple of dense and incompetent slackers. Hungover from the night before, the two knuckleheads find themselves as the only escapees of an attack on their school by evil forces. With a limited number of resurrections through pick-ups called Lazarus Stones, the duo sets off in a series of misadventures to confront these forces.

There’s a lot of attitude in the dialogue and character interactions, but don’t expect anything particularly special; and hopefully, readers won’t care about copy quirks like lack of proper capitalization and punctuation. The two brothers are discernable through the color of their clothes rather than their personality, and I honestly can’t tell which is which. Whether intentional or not, the story comes across as a 1990s Pauly Shore/Stephen Baldwin slapstick film, with two morons stooging their way through dangerous locales including volcanic caves, a Satanic castle, and the innards of a dragon.

Some kind of Suicide Squad

With pixel art and precise platforming, it is easy to cite fellow indie splatformers Super Meat Boy and Celeste as points of comparison. The obvious difference with REZ PLZ is the importance of co-operative play (single player with character switching is a less-fun option). The brothers can jump, wall-jump, do a basic attack, and eventually gather magical abilities such as turning into stone or absorbing and shooting fireballs, but essential co-op elements include a boost jump, and as mentioned, the general use of your partner’s corpse as a tool.

The main story has five chapters with six levels each, along with some tougher “Gauntlet” levels. A single level can range from five minutes on the short-end to twenty minutes if players are struggling to get a puzzle just right. While the platforming isn’t any more unique than what one would see in other games in the genre, there was still much satisfaction to be gained from figuring out the levels’ designs. But ultimately, you’re still grabbing on ledges and jumping on moving platforms—even if said ledge or platform is the lifeless husk of your brother.

Death and Taxes and Glitches

REZ PLZ plays all of the gruesome death pretty straight—save for the first instance in the game’s intro, the brothers approach gruesome dismemberment and exploding bodies rather casually. Perhaps it’s this lackadaisical tone that bothered me more the further I got into the game. The animations and methods of death became gorier and increasingly disturbing; shock value isn’t very sustainable in this way, and while a controversial game like SWERY’s The Missing may have debate and discourse over its thematics and use of self-harm, this game is more like watching Kenny die differently on every episode of South Park.

Ultimately, it’s the game’s technical issues that lead to its undoing. Crashes were frequent to the point where I was unable to progress late in the story. Visual glitches would cause one of the brothers and several elements of the environment to become flickering white rectangles, making most of the screen undiscernible and requiring a soft reset. Occasionally, I could get a character off the beaten path through a bug, resulting in me breaking the puzzle. This game has far too many wrinkles to iron out to even function in its current state.

There isn’t anything profound or clever that REZ PLZ says about mortality or video game tropes; the macabre displays of self-harm and strategic suicide is simply to make the players cringe and recoil. REZ PLZ may scratch a splatformer itch, but buyer beware of the bloodshed.