In a world where games often look the same, having your own unique aesthetic style is key. Lots of Unreal Engine 5 games blur into one because, while striking in terms of visual fidelity, there’s only so much you can really do to make dirt, water, and forests look unique. It’s a similar story with cartoon-style games – Minecraft has its own pixel aesthetic, but competitors that have come after it have struggled to really move away from that blocky, cartoonish feel. For the developers at 4J Studios, who are working on Reforj, that’s an issue they’ve been grappling with. Their answer? Rixels.
Let’s start at the beginning. If you haven’t heard of Reforj, it’s an upcoming sandbox survival game from 4J, the team that ported Minecraft – among others – to console. Reforj shares a lot of Minecraft’s DNA: vibrant colors, as well as a heavy focus on exploration and building, but the team has been working to give it its own unique identity – something familiar, but also new.
That’s where the Rixels come in. Designed as part of a colossal visual overhaul, 4J Co-Founder and Chairman Chris van der Kuyl says that the decision was born of “wanting everything to be the best performing part of our game that it can be, with The Element Engine being the single best experience you’ll ever have in voxel sandbox. That’s led us to reassess, ‘Were we going down the right route?'”
This, in turn, paved the way for Rixels, the company’s new visual technology. “This is genuinely brand new,” van der Kuyl says. “This does not exist anywhere else, and to be able to say that in 2026 about a game doesn’t happen very often.” You can see the Rixels in action in the video below, and I won’t lie, it really is night and day looking at older footage versus the ‘Rixelified’ version. I’ve officially coined that term.
“To a large degree, Rixels are like pixels,” CTO Richard Reavy says. “They’re stored in very similar textures, but we’ve added extra information to the textures to store which shape exists at each pixel location… We’ve taken the idea of a voxel, which is normally just a cube, and we’ve extended that to be all sorts of different shapes that can fit within a cube. Rixels are really a two-dimensional equivalent of that.”
Rixels don’t lose definition, and remain high resolution no matter how close you get to them. It meant a complete ground-up rework for the game, but, to borrow Community Manager Callum Hurley’s words, it makes “the world more visually striking and unmistakably Reforj.”
I can’t help but agree. Having taken a look at the pre-alpha trailer from a year ago, the new Reforj feels much brighter and more vibrant. Textures still retain that cubic, voxel feel, but don’t have the same angular vibe as Minecraft, making the world feel a little smoother overall. It’s an impressive step up, that’s for sure, and the game looks better for it.
“Rixels represent much, much more than just pure graphics technology,” van der Kuyl says. “This represents a milestone moment in the development of Reforj.” I can’t help but agree, and if you’re as excited about the game’s future as I am, you can wishlist it on Steam right now.