Developed/Published by: sunset visitor / Fellow Traveller
Released: 9/05/2024
Completed: 13/01/2025
Completion: Completed it: the “blue” ending.

-03

Man, I just don’t know where to start with this one. 

01

With 1000xRESIST, it’s good to go in blind. But not too blind. It’s important to understand that 1000xRESIST is a story first and foremost, but it’s also much preferable to not know what that story is at all.

02 

The conflict, in my mind, is the eternal one: play vs storytelling. 1000xRESIST starts with the flash-forward–never my favourite trope–and throws you back to the beginning to play through a section that features fixed camera angles and no map, having you wander around lost picking up only the barest fragments of narrative–all of which reflect things that you ultimately won’t understand for hours. It’s a surprisingly cold, unwelcoming experience, and it was really only the plaudits that pulled me through.

-01

As is often the case, as I stumble to a year’s end I think about all the games, movies and music of the previous year that are on people’s “best of the year!” lists and that I never seemed to get around to, and then I start trying to cram it all down before I get too far into the next year and end up struggling to catch up in that one.

This year, it felt necessary to play 1000xRESIST, because it’s probably the game I heard about the most with the most universal praise–without actually learning anything specific about it. I guess it looked like… maybe a kind of third person action adventure, or something?

07

The thing about 1000xRESIST is that it’s never actually that fun to play. It cycles through interface and mechanic–third person, first person, some light “Gravity Rush” notes–but in many if not most cases you’re just walking between visual novel nodes. In at least one section that you return to repeatedly you do get a map–you even get a vague radar to help you navigate–but running around it to pick up extra beats is… at best boring, and at worst, annoying and tedious.

03

But once you are through the first segment, and the game starts to reveal more openly what it’s actually about… 1000xRESIST feels revelatory. After a significant period of time when it felt like every movie and TV show was about trauma, one does struggle to not roll their eyes at a work that is quite focused on the idea of “intergenerational trauma” but 1000xRESIST works to actually interrogate that idea from multiple vectors. What starts as cold SF peels one layer away to show a previous generation, and then one before that…

-02

“Every life, a universe.”

04 

I think for many people, 1000xRESIST will speak to them so directly. It spoke to me. It reminds me of Venba, a game that I found deeply, deeply personal, dealing with many of the same themes, but it also faces up to many things about our current moment: how to not just survive totalitarianism, pandemics, isolation, but how we can find meaning, joy, connection. Reasons to continue.

08

The game’s true “mechanic” isn’t movement in the world–it’s movement in time. More rarely than you’d expect, you jump between nodes of memory, which allows you to, for example, move between spaces you couldn’t in one time, or more generally see specific moments that allow you to unlock more. It’s almost always extremely straightforward–I actually spend far more time in some segments where you were expected to find things in the levels that didn’t even feature the mechanic. 

How much does the mechanic add? I’m not sure. This article’s framing is a lie; if you’ve skipped around the numbers, trying to piece it together in “order”–you don’t ever do anything like that in the game (though you do have to, in your own mind, later). You really just go through the story in order–like you’re reading an article on a page.

05

I think 1000xRESIST’s most damning failing is that it is so engaged with reflecting its themes that it just goes on too long. It sounds harsh for a game that I polished off in a neat seven hours, but the game has a split structure–a second round of mystery–that felt like when a Netflix series cuts away from what you’re actually interested in for an entire episode to drag things out.

06

The music is extremely good for a soundtrack this expansive (85 tracks???) and the effort exerted here pays off; the music does what good music does–fills in a lot of the blanks.

10

1000xRESIST takes a strange turn, right at the end, where it acquiesces to being a video game in a way that it hasn’t before. Is it cathartic?

• NO
• YES

Epilogue (no)

1000xResist is a game about memory, really. But it makes a decision to show us probably the most consequential character never from their POV; no matter how many memories we see of them, we never know them. There are blank spaces, at points, where you might feel holes can be poked; things don’t fit together. Maybe you don’t like this person, in the end. I know I wasn’t impressed. Did they deserve my catharsis, my forgiveness?

Does it matter?

Epilogue (yes)

“Every life, a universe.”