Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is a different kind of game — it is a generational leap in terms of graphical fidelity, performance, game design, and engineering. It is, in many ways, a glimpse into the future of gaming, and the staggeringly talented folks over at Insomniac Games deserve a metric ton of praise and commendation for what they’ve been able to accomplish.

A couple of seconds of gameplay is all that is necessary for your jaw to hit the floor. We’ve never seen anything like it and, needless to say, it’s impossible not to get hyped for what’s to come. Most titles tend to be released for multiple platforms, and a good chunk of them are cross-gen as well. This means that developers not only have to adjust their game to different console architectures but different levels of performance, too. This invariably leaves a mark on the game and is more often than not a hindrance. And it’s the cross-gen titles that take the biggest hit. Developers can either deliver a more consistent product that’ll run similarly across a slew of different consoles (as was the case with, say, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla) or, in what is now known as a historic blunder of epic proportions, do what CD Projekt Red did with Cyberpunk 2077 — focus on a couple of platforms and then basically sacrifice the rest.

Titles are cross-platform and cross-gen mostly for financial reasons. Still, we’re slowly (but surely) starting to move away from such a trend. We’ll never move away from it fully, of course, but Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all know that the key to winning the ongoing console war lies solely in first-part titles and intellectual properties. 

Are you a fan of God of War? Then you’ll have to buy a PlayStation console to experience the latest installment. The same goes for Halo and any kind of Mario title (of which there are many). And when a game is made just for a single console architecture and a single console generation — and the developer is given ample financial backing and enough time to create something worthy of mentioning — that’s when the most mind-blowing titles tend to be brought into existence. 

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is one such title, and boy has it awed us in all the right ways!

Passing through portals (or rifts, rather) is at the heart of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. They’re not only a fun gameplay mechanic, but also an astounding achievement because of the way in which they leverage the sheer prowess of the PlayStation 5.

These rifts — or different worlds, to be more exact — are all rendered in real time. In other words, the game is rendering two totally different worlds all at the same time, and you can move from one to the other without any cutscenes or loading screens whatsoever. 

All of this is possible not just because of the PS5’s sheer computational power, but also because of its blazingly fast NVMe SSD (±5.5 GB/s). 

Its speed can perhaps best be illustrated with the following tidbit: turning the camera at any point in the game will automatically unload whatever is behind the player (that whole part of the rendered world) and therefore free up memory. This, in turn, has allowed Insomniac to cram in even more effects and textures and whatever else they could come up with and render these things “in front” of the player. So, in other words, only half of the world you’re in is rendered and actually visible — the other half gets brought up whenever necessary. It’s a constant balancing act and is truly an astounding achievement. 

The fact that they can bring up quite literally half of the entire world you’re inhabiting in just a couple of frames is mind-blowing. Heck, we’re putting it mildly here! There’s no need for the game to hold these assets and render them in real time when the internal storage is so incredibly fast — the game can just pull any information it needs in a fraction of a second. 

The key takeaway here isn’t that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is an amazing video game (that’s a given), but rather that we’ve finally reached the point of absolute, mind-blowing realism, and that the games of the future — near future, one might add — will be more realistic, visceral, and engaging in ways we cannot even imagine.

We all fantasized about this astonishing level of engagement and realism, but such a future seemed far more remote than it currently is. 

Remember when Lead System Architect Mark Cerny went on stage to wax poetic about the PS5 and its incredible technological prowess? Turns out, that wasn’t marketing hogwash. His emphasis on the internal NVMe storage was warranted after all. And, well, we knew it’d be a big deal, but no one could have foreseen just how big of an impact the introduction of such fast storage would have on game development. What at that point seemed like an exhausting deep dive into something most folks could never reap the benefits of, was actually a glimpse into the future of gaming. 

Moreover, the fact that the PlayStation 4 had a mechanical 2.5” hard drive — running at a leisurely 5400rpm — makes this whole transition all the more mind-blowing. The difference in speed is astounding. This one fact cannot be overstated enough.

In any case, if you happen to own a PlayStation 5 and want to experience what next-gen gaming really feels like, make sure to pick up Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart — you will not regret it!