The You That Remains, And Remains and Remains, And ‘1000xRESIST’

One of the oddities of writing about video games for the past several years is the phenomenon of trying to write something that does your favorite games justice. Since writing, for me, is a clumsy process of precisifying why you feel a certain way about a game, writing a magnum opus about my favorite games of all time feels like an impossible pressure that I can’t live up to, despite covering hundreds of video games. It’s almost as though games in my top 25 list like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are doomed to obscurity – I won’t write about them simply because I love them too much to reduce them to a single article. My experience with 1000xRESIST cannot be reduced other than to say it’s the first time since NieR: Automata that caused me to genuinely question my favorite game of all time, but I am still going to try to do 1000xRESIST justice. 

I played 1000xRESIST, the debut game from Sunset Visitor, over the course of a week, this September. Usually, as I’ve written before, I lack self-control and binge through games at breakneck speed once I realize they’ve hooked me. But after the three opening chapters of 1000xRESIST, my gut couldn’t withstand any additional punches, so I needed some regimented admixture of an outside walk, a therapy session, and a long nap before the next day’s chapter. I thus took the remaining game one chapter at a time, sleepwalking into existential crises day after day. Most of my contributions to the Critical Games Discussion channel in the Epilogue Gaming Discord server took the form of a collage of the following emojis, because words repeatedly failed me and yet I needed to process 1000xRESIST with others: 👀🤯😭. 

If the emojis don’t get the point across, perhaps these words from my partner will, when she emerged to see me finishing chapter 7 of 1000xRESIST: “You’re crying…at a video game…AGAIN?!”

I finished 1000xRESIST one week ago, at the moment of this writing, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Arriving at this game almost half a year after the initial press cycle, there is no shortage of beautiful and insightful writing about 1000xRESIST. So, for the first time in years, I’d like to let others speak for me and spend this article highlighting my favorite discussions of the game before offering thoughts of my own. Like the game, these thoughts may arrive out of order, or recursively reexamine the same observations about 1000xRESIST, but all for the purpose of assembling an understanding of what makes this game so special for me.

“Don’t Miss This Stylish New Time-Bending Adventure” by Willa Rowe

“It’s a wonderfully executed—if morbid— meditation on how ephemeral life is, but also how our minds can’t help but revisit events in our lives over and over again.”

One of the things I struggled with the most while playing 1000xRESIST is how to discuss a game so obviously told outside of traditional linear storytelling. The very opening of 1000xRESIST, for instance, shows an intensely spoiler-heavy scene devoid of context, one to which you will return several times during 1000xRESIST’s remaining runtime. As you revisit each pivotal scene, you gain deeper insight, witnessing the same events with additional information and entirely new perspectives. By the end, this ephemeral assemblage might destroy your life (in a good way).

1000xRESIST is a fractal image that becomes both clearer and more puzzling with each iteration, each feeble attempt to grasp at meaning in a nihilistic universe. We witness so much death and suffering through the tragic tales of Iris, Jiao, Watcher, and civilization itself, that these traumas vicariously become ours. Even by the finale of 1000xRESIST, my brain wanted one more chapter, one more pass over the memories that we’ve seen several times by the end. Like Watcher, the protagonist for a solid half of the game, I couldn’t help but go back, grasping for orientation in a vacuum of a universe that resisted such certainty at a particle level.

I resonated with Willa Rowe’s discussion of 1000xRESIST, not least of which because of their line about that thin dichotomy between meaning and purposelessness, between the constant beauty of existence and the guarantee of oblivion, that the game so powerfully explores. There is a subtle distinction between remembering and dwelling; 1000xRESIST offers us an anatomy of each. Only in the ending moments of the game does the game tip the scale and offer commentary about which sides of the dichotomy it most wants to explore. 

“1000xRESIST Review: Mystery’s Irresistible Pull” by Taylor Hicklen

“1000xRESIST knows the older definition: a mystery is something I cannot ever truly know, no matter how many angles I observe, how many clues I poke and prod. I can only learn to make peace with my partial answers.”

Building directly on the discussion above, I find it striking that so many players like myself experienced 1000xRESIST’s mystery as an impossible one. Surely, there will one day be the four-hour YouTube explainer, but in the meantime, 1000xRESIST is one of those rare games that explodes within critical conversation yet has largely not been considered a mainstream success in the traditional AAA sense. The fact that, even after 10 hours of story, and for many of my friends like Dave Jackson of the fantastic Tales From the Backlog podcast, replaying the first chapter after hitting the credits felt required to make more sense out of that initial disorientation, proves the depth of the substantially impressive and simultaneously impenetrable twists and turns that 1000xRESIST’s narrative takes.

Looking at 1000xRESIST, not just as a sci-fi game, but as a mystery, makes sense for so many reasons. But for players thinking to try 1000xRESIST and haven’t yet, it cannot be stressed how incomplete an understanding the game leaves you with, and yet how absolutely over-saturated your brain will be at the end of every chapter. It’s as though the game is, at best, willing to confirm when you’ve finished the outline of the puzzle pieces, but everything inside is an impressionist slop that must be combed over again and again. The beautiful part of this repetition is how exploring these story moments, both pivotal and inconsequential, adds a degree of completeness to the experience of 1000xRESIST, and I never once felt the game dragging in a meaningful way – at least, if it did drag, it was to produce an affect that was worthwhile to earn as a player. 

Rather than replaying 1000xRESIST immediately after credits, as I am wont to do, I have to decide to conclude my analysis and let it rest within my brain for a few years. I’ve chosen my ending, and I’ve replayed the final sequence enough times to unlock each corresponding Steam Achievement, but even with all of the information possible, I still don’t have enough. And that’s remarkable – that a game of which I’ve witnessed all components still feels like it has mysteries left to be unraveled.

“1000xResist review – a deeply personal exploration of diaspora politics and psychology” by Alexa Ong

“What makes it so jarring and so open to these claims is the fact that it is simply not a game made for the white gaze, and I think that’s beautiful.”

One of the consistent points of amazement as I’ve spent the past week rifling through podcasts and articles deep-diving into 1000xRESIST is how authentically it portrays issues of diaspora politics – something, as a white person, is deeply removed from my lived experience – something that was, at the very least, educative to see explored in a game. 1000xRESIST opens the lid to a conversation I’m not used to seeing in the video game space, and I have been moved to tears from people speaking and writing about how they see themselves, their parents, and even their culture, inside of the elements of 1000xRESIST that so intentionally explore (ongoing) historical events like the Hong Kong umbrella movement. 

“What 1000xResist does exceptionally well here is to reproduce individual-level anxiety, and reframe and reamplify it on every level of the game’s narrative as Watcher’s journey spirals beyond a small contained setting into a devastating global spectacle.”

I will never forget certain moments in my own political history. Some moments have felt existential for me, like the incessant waves of anti-transgender legislation that have displaced thousands of people internally within the United States and threaten to exile many of us as international refugees. Others are more culturally collective, albeit they feel just as personal, like the ongoing housing crisis, issues of inflation, and economic inequality that entrench themselves in every facet of daily life. And some are existential, like climate change – which, as I write, I watch Hurricane Helene rip apart half of the southeastern coast with unprecedented flooding and mass death in places like North Carolina – a state traditionally seen as exempt from hurricane disaster preparedness, but which was hit arguably harder than Florida where it made landfall. 

In all cases, 1000xRESIST captures the feeling of verisimilitude within each scale of event – the things that impact the player character, the things that impact the society within which they live, and the very foundation of reality off which civilization is even possible. These moments triage into a sense of history, and that amalgamated history is the frontier to which 1000xRESIST, one way or another, voyages.

It’s aporetic to compare traumas and tragedies, as though a tier-list of our suffering might offer some vague promise of closure for our unhealed wounds. And to that end, 1000xRESIST doesn’t naively traipse into an ethical treatise lecturing players about rights and wrongs. Instead, it breaks your heart again and again – ad infinitum – until there’s nothing left to break. Only then, with every perspective motivated, can you begin to sift through the remaining grains of sand that were your initial impressions of the narrative, your sense of how suffering scales both through time and space. The question, then, becomes what meaning to make of the parts of you that you can still recognize after all else has been disfigured or even dissolved.

“1000xResist leans right into the fractured reality of governance and tells you to make choices that can’t possibly serve everyone, but, like Iris, albeit with a smidge less psychopathy, you can choose what serves you.”

One of the strange but compelling elements of 1000xRESIST is how it uses agency and responsibility in tension with each other. For narrative games like 1000xRESIST, offering choice and consequence is nothing new, but the manner in which the player characters (and perhaps the player themself) are held responsible is gripping beyond what I’m used to from video games. Without judgment or explicit scorn, 1000xRESIST pushes responsibility for its final narrative conclusion onto the player. With some degree of implicit culpability, only your judgment and intentions can be transmuted into the world that now exists, into the future. This is borne out in the “bad” endings that are all-too-easy to achieve, where, having made up your own mind for your own “canonical” takeaways from 1000xRESIST, the game finally is willing to judge you – whether through the form of Mauve’s gun or otherwise. There is, in short, still a message to take away here – but the act of making your own choice at the end is something that any ending, however canonical, cannot take away.

“1000xRESIST is a game for a post-2019 Hong Kong protest generation of diaspora children that doesn’t exist yet.” by kastelpls

“But after a certain point in this game, I saw Hong Kong in everything. The game even encouraged it. I was running through corridors that reminded me of the videos people shot as they ran away from the police. I saw an interrogation that followed the same premises as Gui Minhai’s forced TV confessions. Whether the player is reliving memories of Iris and her parents or wandering through the hubs to find a purpose in life, the parallels are everywhere: ALLMOTHER looms over the horizon like China watching over Hong Kong’s every move, the soldiers at Iris’ school resemble the orange soldier clones patrolling the Orchard, and the game’s mothers are unable to connect with their daughters. These aren’t just parallels; they are the continuation of a trauma that never ceased and everyone is recreating the Hong Kong and China dynamic over and over again.”

Though I lived in China as an extended study abroad in 2015, I have never visited Hong Kong. Nor would I pretend to understand the fraught nuances of Chinese culture aside from what I learned in my studies and from conversations with Guangxi Normal University students as I stayed with them. When I flew across the Pacific to Guilin, I was told of three taboo Ts: Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen Square. Hong Kong, while inheriting a complicated history, seemed prosperous and independent enough – but it was not a taboo topic. Yet, as political events crossed into my daily feed in 2019 once I had returned home to America, those naive conceptions revealed themselves to be incomplete at best, and harmfully reductive at worst. Still, devoid of Hong Kong’s explicit history, the protagonist’s forced confessions present in chapter seven of 1000xRESIST are an unforgettable moment in the narrative, one that adds to the crescendo at the turning point within the narrative where I couldn’t hold in the tears any longer. 

1000xRESIST is a story about being unable to let go of trauma, in this case Hong Kong and its historical (and recent) legacy, but to say that’s all it’s about is just another fractal element of this multifaceted, three-dimensional puzzle of a narrative. Like survivors of diasporic events, only individuals themselves can determine what to accept, what to reject, and what to recreate in the new world they inhabit. A theme I noticed when listening to podcasts about 1000xRESIST was how the relationship between both Jiao and Iris, as well as Iris and her mother, were seen as deeply relatable because of how quickly cultural memory becomes a point of stagnation and embarrassment. Leaving behind tired tropes of “smelly lunch,” 1000xRESIST intersects intergenerational maternal memory, pitting equally valid notions of the world and the way it could be against one another. Again, the player’s task is what to do with what is left behind, as it is to the characters who turn off the lights at the story’s end.

“If there is a true antagonist in the entire game, it is memory.”

When I recommended 1000xRESIST to my best friend, who recently became a father and has not played a video game since his child was born, my recommendation was thus: “it challenges the assumption that you can get closer to the truth of an event the more you revisit it (via memory).” Like other forms of temporal rhetoric, such as the myth of progress, there is a naive belief that the access we have to the past is like an archive that can perfectly recreate and even restore the gaps of our all-too-human faculties. 

1000xRESIST, unlike trauma-explorations such as That Dragon, Cancer or Before Your Eyes, defies the relationship between knowledge, exploration, and implication. That is, revolve like the moon we might, we are still an insignificant sphere rotating around a larger, more important sphere, that when you really zoom out, hasn’t even considered the sun at the center of it all. Narratively, you could say 1000xRESIST is globocentrism personified.

“1000xResist’s Magnificent Operatic Heterotopia” by Luis Aguasvivas

“The techno-futurist game 1000xResist, developed by Sunset Visitor and published by Fellow Traveller, explores a lie that has morphed into a labyrinthine edifice.” 

Herein lies the center of what I love most about 1000xRESIST: this idea that explores how a lie, or at least, a limited way of envisioning the world, can transform an entire world under its own terrific weight. There are so many layers at which 1000xRESIST explores this concept on that same sliding scale between individual and conceptual, between ideology and physics. Playing 1000xRESIST felt so disorienting, so compelling, because it navigates like a labyrinth. You get lost making mental turns and sometimes even forget how to retrace your steps, but there remains a way out – or, one might say, many.

Alas, 2,500 words later, and I still can’t pin 1000xRESIST down. It’s the rare game that makes me feel like a white belt on the mat with black belts, where every time I think I have a new ingenious idea of how to understand or explain the game, it anticipates my move and defeats me. To say I love that unrelenting method of storytelling would be an alarming understatement, for as I alluded at this article’s beginning, I haven’t actively reconsidered what my favorite video game is in years – not since NieR: Automata. 1000xRESIST is so clever, so compelling, so unrelentingly challenging, that I feel helpless. No description can do this game justice. 

And so there’s the me that desperately wants to share this game with everyone, that tries desperately to capture the essence of this game in several thousand words. There’s the me that has tirelessly combed through every article and podcast I can find discussing this brilliant work of art. There’s the me that lies awake at night, staring at the ceiling and wondering what modern revolutions, what diasporas, and what tragedies we might be ignoring, perpetuating, or recreating. And then there’s the me that remains. And the me that remains, and remains, and remains. And then there’s 1000xRESIST, above space-time, contemplating my own contemplation, above all such speculation. And that’s the heart of 1000xRESIST, the game that changed how I see video games, and maybe even fiction altogether.

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