Reforj Title Update 8 overhauls the game's visuals with a new Rixel system

Reforj's Title Update 8 is live on Xbox Series X|S, and it's the biggest visual overhaul the game has seen. Six months of work from the art and engineering teams has produced an entirely new rendering approach built around something called Rixels.

Rixels are custom geometric building blocks — think pixels, but far more flexible. Where traditional pixel art is locked to squares, Rixels currently support up to 23 distinct shapes, each with its own material properties including metallic levels and roughness. The practical result is sharper diagonal lines, cleaner fine detail, and a more expressive world that still reads clearly at a glance. The previous faceted art style struggled with exactly those problem areas, so the team experimented with vector-inspired techniques combined with custom geometric block shapes until the Rixel approach emerged as both a technical fix and a new artistic identity. Beyond looks, the storage savings are dramatic: a texture that previously needed a 512×512 image at roughly 4MB can now be stored in around 72KB — a 98.2% reduction. That headroom gives the team more flexibility to ship more content and experiment with materials that weren't practical before.

Reforj is a voxel-style sandbox game currently in pre-alpha, accessible through the Xbox Insider Hub. It sits in a crowded genre where visual clarity and creative tools are major differentiators, so a rendering overhaul of this scale is a meaningful signal about where the project is heading. Cutting texture storage by 98% isn't just a technical footnote — it directly expands what the developers can build without hitting hardware or storage constraints.

To try the update, players on Xbox Series X|S can join through the Xbox Insider Hub under Previews > Reforj. The team recommends rebooting the console after enrollment to make sure the latest build installs correctly. The playtest remains Xbox Series X|S exclusive for now.