The first feeling that reached me throughout my five-hour journey of playing 1000xResist was how difficult it was to pin down the game. So often we try to understand and frame games by genres and containers that it’s hard to describe what you are feeling when you experience such a rebellious and artistic performance inside a video game.
In 1000xResist, humanity is near extinction. Wiped out by an incurable disease brought by alien observers called Occupants, Iris, a teenage girl living with her parents in Canada, is one of humanity’s few survivors. Changed by the experience, she reshapes herself into the ALLMOTHER, creates six clones of herself and leads humanity in an undersea vessel called the Orchard.
The developers at Sunset Visitor are equally intriguing. As a studio founded by Cantonese-Canadian musicians and performative artists with no prior game development experience, Sunset Visitor is relatively new to the game. During the COVID-19 lockdown, they found themselves out of gigs and playing Animal Crossing on their couches. This experience inspired them to create their first video game — 1000xResist.
You play as Watcher, one of six sisters cloned from Iris’s DNA. Names don’t exist on the Orchard, and each sister is only given titles that represent their societal functions, i.e. Principal, Healer, Fixer, Bang Bang Fire and Knower. Your goal is to record and interpret the life story of the ALLMOTHER, through a process known as communion, where you embody the ALLMOTHER as she walks through her memories.
The game thrusts this information upon you in a non-linear pattern, mixed in with a specific dialect that the characters use to talk to each other. Characters drop distinctive one-liners before you get used to who they are and their relations to you. By the time your brief interactions are over, you experience a heartache and longing to reunite with a character you met only five minutes ago.
The abstract and lofty dialogue doesn’t make sense at first, but you are enraptured by Sunset Visitor’s artistic direction, fully voice-acted dialogue and carefully timed narrative beats that you choose to believe in the story you are led through.
It feels atmospheric, in a way like a Wong Kar-wai movie — “In the Mood for Love” is one of their many inspirations alongside Satoshi Kon. Conversations play out like pieces of a puzzle, except this puzzle spans across two separate timelines: unveiling the conspiracy of the ALLMOTHER in the future and learning how the world became this way through Iris’s memories. You are given answers to questions you don’t yet know and problems with no solution.
You relive Iris Kwan’s life through these communions and empathize with her life as a high school child born to immigrant parents, overhearing fights from her parents and experiencing flashbacks to current world events. From being pigeon-holed as the Asian model “smart” minority to eating Cantonese sausage cold from the fridge, these moments are deeply personal experiences shared across the Asian diaspora.
The game uses the high school setting — a place full of angst and raw emotions — in flashbacks to lay the groundwork for the bigger picture, carefully tackling their implications in the future sci-fi world of the Orchard.
The major narrative of 1000xResist focuses on the experience of immigration and fleeing political persecution. Iris’s memories give us a close-up perspective on life through the diaspora conflicts she experiences, and her identity as the ALLMOTHER gives us a vision of the future where our flaws and beauty are passed on through generations: from Iris’s parents to her, and now from ALLMOTHER to the six sisters.
In many ways, it is obvious that the developers do not come from the shared handbook of game design theory taught and regurgitated in industry job interviews.
The mechanics of 1000xResist can be counted on one hand, and they differ drastically from the carefully crafted level design and gameplay decisions that The Legend of Zelda, Mario franchise and other staple titles emphasize. 1000xResist plays more as a sci-fi, unreliably narrated memoir than a game.
However, this stubbornness to do things on their terms is also what allows Sunset Visitor to create such a bold vision of the future.
The main mechanics of the game involve traversing back in time inside communions to watch different memories play out. Puzzles require you to teleport back and forth between the past and present. Watcher can also zipline across floating orbs in space within these communions, viewing the memories of the ALLMOTHER/Iris from different perspectives. You experience the game from a third-person perspective, across multiple characters.
The way Sunset Visitor manages to craft such a meaningful story with limited mechanics is what makes this experience such a memorable one. The game is narrative-driven at its core, and it keeps its gaze laser-focused on the message at hand: what it means to be part of the Cantonese-Canadian diaspora. 1000xResist understands the players who entrust it with their time and makes it clear that it is not made for everyone.
This is a story about diaspora: the dispersion or spread of a people from their original homeland. One reason I dislike the word “diaspora” is that it implies we have a point of origin, a homeland, that once we return, we will feel we are at the right place, snug as a piece of jigsaw with soft interlocking edges. But in reality, perhaps we don’t even have a home anymore.
This is why the abstract sci-fi future of 1000xResist with ALLMOTHER is important. It shows us a reality free from convention and norms, and the isolation we feel being stranded in an unfamiliar place is an isolation many overseas Asians are used to.
In my favorite sequence, after months of scrimping, Iris finally manages to save up enough money to move out of her parents’ house and into a small 15 square foot apartment. It is a small, tender moment of triumph, the fleeting feeling of being at the top of the mountain, so surreal that you dig your fingers deep into your flesh as if it might leave you and the dream would all come crashing down.
You get to decide the items Iris leaves behind or brings along as she leaves home. The items you choose offer different flashbacks to Iris’s life in the apartment: things like Iris’s mother arguing with father about how they should be harsher on their daughter and conversations where Iris reconciles with her dad, drinking wine and discussing how he felt like he had abandoned everyone back home when he fled.
A blur of emotions moves past each scene. Some push you to pack up faster, to get out of this traumatic place, and others make you unable to move, pausing in your footsteps. But what I find powerful is being able to choose what those memories mean to you.
At the end of the game, you are prompted to interpret your relationship with your parents — one quote is irreversibly stuck in my mind.
“Mother and Father: they loved me, even if I couldn’t understand it, and that deserves to be remembered.”
The success of 1000xResist to me means much than another emotional narrative-driven game proving that video games are art. It also successfully discusses the hard topic of Asian diaspora within a video game, something mostly critically discussed in memoirs, literature and books — but not games.
With one foot in the past and one foot confidently in the future, 1000xResist manages to do something completely new to cement video games as the next medium of storytelling for our generation and makes me excited to be a game developer in this age.
Daily Arts Contributor Justin Lo can be reached at lojustin@umich.edu.
