Developed/Published by: Twisted Pixel Games / Microsoft Game Studios
Released: 22/11/2013
Completed: 17/01/2025
Completion: Finished it.

Picked this one up because I saw Coury from My Life in Gaming recommend it, somewhat out of nowhere on the channel’s “The Games We Played in 2024” episode (always extremely enjoyable). It caught my eye particularly because it features FMV with James Gunn (filmed basically seconds before he’d take off with Guardians of the Galaxy), Tom Savini and Lloyd Kaufman, and that’s… really weird! It feels like something I’d have noticed at the time, not least because Twisted Pixel were on my radar as one of the teams of the “Xbox Live Arcade” era (thanks to releases like ‘Splosion Man.)

Well, I learned I’d missed not just Lococycle but a lot in the last decade, because not only had they moved on from being a Microsoft Games studio, they’d actually become part of Meta (boo!!!) and have spent their time making VR games for an audience of I assume very few, which is a bit of a bummer. Their last release was short VR beat-em-up Path of the Warrior in 2019, so I hope they’re doing alright (trying to destroy Meta from within, preferably.)

Anyway, I have to remark that it’s absolutely hilarious that I’d somehow manage to play two games in a row that heavily feature a character called Iris, except in this case she’s a sentient motorbike that can’t speak Spanish. 

Yep, there’s no throughline with 1000xRESIST here [“no one would have imagined there was”–Ed.] though I have to say I’m impressed with just how stupid Lococycle is willing to be. It feels like a game where everything about it was decided based on the phrase “it would be funny if..” and then no one bothered to check if it that was actually that funny or not. I mean, this is a game where the main gag is that you’re controlling a bike that has a mechanic being dragged behind it because his trouser leg is tangled on the bike’s exhaust! And then the guy is played by Freddy Rodríguez in the FMV! That guy’s a real actor!

The game itself is pretty simple, but I’m going to go ahead and say it’s a pretty clever way for them to do a narrative game without having to resort to making something that’s not much more than a visual novel–or making it possible for the player to mess too much with the pacing based on how they play. Because every level has a constant forward momentum (you’re on a bike!) each level essentially runs on a timeline–waves of enemies and narrative hit when they want it to.

But it doesn’t entirely feel on-rails; you have to control the bike, and there’s just (just) enough variety to cover the game’s four hour runtime. You have the basic, Spy Hunter “chase and shoot enemies”, then a take on the classic Arkham Asylum counter combo system, and finally a bunch of quick time events that are (thankfully) easy and I believe impossible to actually fail. There’s a few other mini-games (one to repair the bike via on-screen inputs, etc.) and a mild upgrade system, too.

It’s nothing that special, and I think it could still have been a bit shorter (you’re definitely done with it at the end) but it’s all rewarding enough in the moment. The FMV videos really stand out because they have the strange pacing of low budget regional filmmaking and the non-sequitur dialogue is, if not improvised, amusingly non-professional. I can imagine lots of people being turned off by this, but I’m someone who seeks out things like Shower of Screams and is in heaven for the entire running time (seriously, watch it) so the entirely “off” nature of all the FMV here is a rare pleasure–it’s not intentionally bad in a way you’re meant to enjoy ironically, it’s just… awkward, and that awkwardness gets you on side. You find it charming.

I mean they managed to get Robert Patrick to play an evil motorbike and read some of the daftest dialogue he’s probably ever had put in front of him, and watching it you just think how lovely it is that he doesn’t take himself too seriously.

Anyway. Sure, Lococycle isn’t the greatest but I appreciate that there’s nothing else out there like it!

Will I ever play it again? I can’t imagine that I will.

Final Thought: For any historians out there, something really wonderful about the release is that there’s so much behind the scenes documentation in the game, with videos of all their shooting days and loads of photos of concept art and renders. I don’t get the sense that this did particularly well (it was an Xbox One launch title, oof) but I love that if you want to know literally everything there is to know about this game, it’s all right there!

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.”

Developed/Published by: PanicBarn / No More Robots
Released: 31/01/2020
Completed: 10/01/2025
Completion: Got the “good” ending!

It’s 2025 and we’re coming up on five years of Brexit, so what better time to play Not Tonight, PanicBarn’s Brexit satire? It’s not just because I scrolled backwards on my Switch to find the earliest game that I’d bought and not played or anything. It’s definitely because of the anniversary.

A long time ago, I was critical of Papers, Please for casting the player as a border agent in a fictional non-western country, arguing that it would bite far more if you were actually playing a TSA agent or something. To be honest, I do think I was being a bit inflexible (I mean, allegory is fine! I love Andor!!!) but it’s really nice to play Not Tonight and see a game that is not just like “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re cowards” but positively gleeful about it. The contrast between Papers, Please and Not Tonight had me going: you know what? Garth Marenghi was right.

In Not Tonight, you play as a Brit who has been stripped of their citizenship due to the vagaries of Brexit, and you are forced by an odious immigration agent to work as a bouncer in order to survive and pay him off. To not be completely bleak however the game also features a thread of resistance, as you can in small ways work to undermine the government’s ever-increasing xenophobia.

In some respects, Not Tonight feels more vital than ever. The game presents a UK that gets more and more shite as the game goes on, and I think there’s a chance that if you played it even a few months earlier you might have gone “well, the UK is getting more and more shite, but it’s not as bad as this game is making it out to be.” However, in the cold light of a Trump re-election and the lame-duck Labour government grasping at straws that all seem to say “fuck immigrants” or “uh… AI?” on them, it’s hard not to see a future coming quickly in which things get worse much quicker. I mean while I was playing this there was a huge right-wing civil war over skilled visas in the USA, that bell-end Elon Musk argued Nigel Farage wasn’t right-wing enough for him (because he wouldn’t support literal white supremacist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon!?) and a poll showed that if another election happened Reform would smash it.

It really does feel like we’re living on the precipice of another event like when Liz Truss crashed the UK economy, except instead of it all being taken back and months later Liz Truss claiming that it’s libelous for anyone to say she crashed the UK economy, whoever in charge will skip right to delusion without the “take it all back” part.

It’s grim.

Anyway, Not Tonight is very much “Brexit Papers, Please” in terms of most of the play is going to be looking at documents under time pressure, and choosing to let people in or not, with penalties and failure tied to, well, how well you can look at documents under pressure. Initially I was like “this isn’t fun” and then I was like “oh yeah, this is fun” but the problem is that you hit “this is repetitive” way, way before the game is over.

As much as Not Tonight adds wrinkles to the proceedings–now you have to scan people, now the criteria are different, etc.–the game can’t really escape that you’re doing the same few inputs over and over basically forever. There does come a point where the game is almost second nature, and you’re just speeding through it, but I can’t say that bends the experience around to “fun” again. It’s more sort of… blessedly untroubling. 

I suppose it could have been much worse–the game takes place across 3 months in a year, and when you start playing it’s January, and about halfway through the month you definitely think “fuck I can’t do twelve months of this shit.” It’s probably about a month too long, but there’s a rule of three so I know why they stretched it out a bit.

(To be honest, the problem might be that the months break the rule of three by being four weeks long, and each month that last week feels like filler. I guess PanicBarn will have to take this up with the Babylonians.)

So, it’s too long, and–most disappointingly–the game fizzles out completely at the end, with a climax that feels rushed and unrewarding. In fact, it’s a touch undermining; the game is thematically strong in its sense of place, but narratively doesn’t seem to work towards any meaningful critique. I didn’t need some sort of “Love Conquers All” Brazil ending, but a “and then everything was fine” title card is the worst of both worlds.

Despite saying all that, I liked Not Tonight, and I think it is because of the context I played it in–it may be a broad satire, but it’s not like it’s not right! Things are fucked!

Will I ever play it again? There’s a DLC that came with it that continues the story on with a side-character that I find the idea of charming enough, but as I said above, the game outstays its welcome just enough that I’m not too bothered about playing it. Maybe one day though, after a long enough break.

Final Thought: Something the game misses interrogating too deeply, sadly, is the player’s own role in post-Brexit society. It doesn’t take any moral stance on if it’s acceptable to work turning away potentially desperate people when you work jobs on the border as you are forced to and have no way to subvert your role, which I think is a bit too “only following orders” for my liking. In the same sphere in the game design there’s a exploit of sorts in that if you buy a particular set of clothes you can sell drugs with no cost to your “social score” and be massively rich by about halfway through the game, and I was struck that I didn’t just sell drugs to make the money–I did it because I was embodying the role of someone who didn’t give a fuck about anything except my own selfish survival because of how the country was treating me. 

I think both of those things would have been really interesting to force the player to consider, and the subtleties of culpability would have helped the satire hit home harder. I mean, I already know things are fucked, and I know it’s the fault of the cunts in charge. But I also think it’s fair to be asked: well, what am I doing about it? What are you doing about it?

Are we just surviving?

Is that enough?

Developed/Published by: Sega CS1 R&D / Sega
Released: 15/03/2011
Completed: 18/12/2024
Completion: Finished the story and all substories (other than the hostess club ones.)

Well, it’s taken me five years to play another game in this series, thanks to a global pandemic meaning my PS3 was in storage miles and miles away from me, and because one of the main roles, Masayoshi Tanimura, was recast for the remastered version, I absolutely refused to play it first (it’s like wanting to play a Lucasarts adventure in EGA. You want to see the original author’s intent!)

Anyway, it’s a good thing too, because–as I mentioned the last time I was on the Insert Credit podcast–Yakuza 4 takes ages to install and while it’s installing it’s the only place you hear the vocal version of the main theme, “For Faith” and it absolutely slaps. They literally just play it about ten times in a row, setting a precedent where I play it ten times in a row. I find it hard to believe there will be a better track across the entire series (though I’m excited to find out if there is) because I have to be honest that nothing from 1, 2, or 3 stuck with me.

You should listen to this while reading the rest of the article, right?

Unfortunately, outside of one of the most hype tracks ever, Yakuza 4 is… kind of a mess? It’s not actively the fault of the Yakuza core, which is all there and accounted for, but simply that the game feels like it’s a billion hours long and the narrative is… genuinely nonsensical.

Taking place a year after Yakuza 3, with Kiryu still running an orphanage in Okinawa, the plot hinges on a massacre of 18 yakuza in 1985 in a botched hit on a clan chairman. We play and follow the stories of Shun Akiyama, a loan shark(!), Masayoshi Tanimura, a corrupt cop(!!) and Taiga Saejima, the guy who did the massacre(!!!) gradually unravelling the mystery of what happened and why it connects their lives, before Kiryu has to show up and (ostensibly) pull all the threads together in a humdinger of a climax.

This does not, exactly, go as you might hope. First let me say that one of my absolute favourite thing about the Yakuza games is that it is a rule that you are playing the kindest, nicest person who ever lived, but who will also, at a drop of a hat, beat you within an inch of your life with the nearest piece of roadworks. It reaches absolutely absurd levels here as our loan shark turns out to be giving his money away without even charging interest [“come on man, at least charge inflation”–Investment Ed.] our corrupt cop turns out to be shaking people down to support and protect immigrants who otherwise have no legal recourse, and our mass murderer turns out to (spoilers!) have never killed anyone at all!!!

This “our heroes are the most honorable men to have ever lived” gimmick is especially funny here because if you look a bit deeper it gets a bit confusing. Our loan shark does a surprising amount of funnelling desperate people into sex work as a condition of a loan (sex work is work, but it definitely feels like coercion) our corrupt cop turns a blind eye to some seriously fucked up stuff to get kickbacks, and Saejima… definitely intended to kill those dudes!

The problem ultimately is that compared to the (relatively) straightforward stories of 2 and 3, 4 gets lost in a web of increasingly unbelievable twists even as it should be following a fairly straightforward episodic form. You have never seen any piece of media where this many characters get shot to death and then turn out to never have been shot at all. Indeed my favourite bit in the game might be when a character says “ok I’m going to kill these two people now” before a cliffhanger, only for one of the characters you just thought were shot to show up in basically the next scene and for another character to attempt to explain away why he said that. It doesn’t work.

The game was written by Masayoshi Yokoyama as the other games have been, but I have to wonder if the script was in flux for a long time, or if there was meddling from the top down. Notably, Kiryu feels absolutely inessential to the plot here. His chapter front loads about an hour of cutscenes and he doesn’t really do anything except any substories you choose to do. It’s possible he wasn’t originally planned to be included, but maybe they just liked the idea of the fourth game having four protagonists.

The game generally feels unbalanced–the first character you play, Akiyama, does seem to have the most interesting stuff to do, and he’s the most charming, interesting non-Kiryu protagonist–and I was disappointed in the substories this time around. Maybe it’s just that I’m four games in, but “go to place, beat up guys, go to other place, beat up guys” isn’t that interesting the hundredth time you do it, and the stories generally aren’t interesting enough to make up for it. 

As usual, there are a zillion mini games, but this time round managing hostesses is made as tedious as possible (you have to walk around the club listening to people and constantly dressing your hostesses differently???) and the only other in-depth mode is a martial artist manager that I wasn’t too excited for either.

This is still a Yakuza game, though, and it’s still entertaining! I love strolling Kamurocho and I still enjoyed the fighting even if I didn’t love having four different fighting styles to remember in the climax. The issues really do relate to the story, which constantly undercuts any opportunity to be moving by constantly being confusing or ridiculous. The game actually ends with an intense one-on-one battle for each of the protagonists to a different arrangement of For Faith and it should have made me so hype but for at least three out of four battles I was confused as to why they were happening.

Unfortunately, I’ve heard that Yakuza 5 doesn’t make massively more sense, but hopefully it won’t take another five years to get to it.

Will I ever play it again? Of the Yakuzas I’ve played, this definitely feels like the most inessential to play. 1 and 2 have Kiwami versions (although I believe that 2 has some cuts and visual downgrading in its remaster) and 3 was chopped to ribbons in localisation, whereas this one has everything in the remastered version. So probably not!

Final Thought: Actually, it might take five years to get there, considering I’ve got two PSP exclusive Yakuzas and Yakuza Dead Souls to get through first. There are so many of these!!!