Indie Game of the Week 421: 1000xResist

Tiny Terry farting around the city of Sprankelwater last week was just a tad too cerebral for my liking so for a change this time I'm instead exploring a deeply metaphorical, metaphysical, and achronological sci-fi adventure game that saw many accolades last year for its bold narrative choices. 1000xResist is set some time after the world's human population has been wiped out by a disease spread by ethereal alien entities named Occupants, usually shown as enormous humanoid figures with missing heads, and the only survivors are an immune woman named Iris and a community of her own clones named solely for their roles in society, such as Knower or Healer. The protagonist is Watcher, who has the unique task of being able to view Iris's memories, and after several of these memory dives she pieces together what happened to Iris in the past and what led her to become the messianic "Allmother", as the clones refer to her. Each chapter typically has you gathering information in the present before joining one of your sisters in one of these dreamlike and subtextual sequences, then reeling with the revelations that are gleaned before trying to come to terms with them and why they were revealed to you. All the while, Watcher grapples with the guilt of betraying her best friend (and possibly lover), Fixer, once the latter uses a forbidden hacking technique to inform Watcher that the Allmother is not what she seems.

There's a lot of things that 1000xResist is "about". It's about the slow but inevitable end of the world. It's about the cultural alienation felt by first-generation immigrants adapting to a new school, new neighbors, and new conventions. It's about having an embarrassing and inconvenient sexuality making one's teen years even more awkward. It's about the infinite vanity and profound loneliness that comes from cloning yourself a thousand times over and having them all worship you, the original, as a god. It's tacitly about COVID19, and about how Chinese-Americans in particular took plenty of unwarranted hits for being the supposed progenitors and "patients zero" of a disease that took the lives of millions. It's about less-than-ideal mother-daughter relationships that veer between protective and controlling. It's about the Hong Kong protests of 2019 and how its citizens demonstrated to retain their democratic autocracy only to be violently thwarted by the motherland's armored riot police. It's about giant terrifying extraterrestrial visitors with origins and motivations inscrutable to us, only that they appear to mean us harm. It has plenty to say and much in the way of lore and themes to digest but I'd argue that 1000xResist's main draw is largely stylistic in nature: it has a permeating sense of the uncanny to it, one where the world has become an insane place where only insane people can adapt to it or make sense of it, and the abstruse manner in which it builds towards a Shakespearean tragedy taking place in the wreckage of a far less conventional sci-fi one.

For many post-apocalyptic games it's about how the remaining people are able to eke out a living in the aftermath; it's rarer to get a glimpse of how they lived and operated in the stress and danger of an Armageddon in progress. Umurangi Generation is another example in this vein where you get several glimpses of the fear and apathy that comes from witnessing the end of days playing out in real time, with hope slowly fading from the hearts of those who have survived so far despite all odds, and 1000xResist's "communions" like to dip between the before and after with a time-travel gimmick that is used to solve a few environmental puzzles too: school bullies in the past blocking the corridor to the cafeteria? They won't be there in the future (nor really much of anyone, besides a few well-protected soldiers with curiously Master Chief-like hazmat suits) so you can flit a few years ahead to walk past their barricade. These basic chronology puzzles help break up the stretches of story that the game focuses on for the most part, giving you a narrative breadcrumb trail to help you work backwards from the game's shocking start to the events and emotions that lead up to it. It's definitely one of those narratives that unwraps slowly (some might say too slowly), layer by layer, as you eventually piece together the motivations of the Allmother, the reservations of your fellow sister-clones, and understand just who or what the Occupants are.

Gameplay-wise, true to its adventure game roots it doesn't do much on an interactive level beyond delivering its narrative through several unconventional framing methods and camera angles, such as the aforementioned communions and their eccentric delivery of vital backstory. That alone is certainly enough for most games in this genre—I tend to posit that adventure games are at their best when they're telling stories in a fashion no other medium can, or at least not as effectively—but it does also give you the occasional thing to do, even if that thing is determining how to navigate what is essentially a nonsensical dream space. Sometimes you'll be warping between floating nodes, quickly finding the next in the chain before gravity takes over. You might need to decipher a linguistic puzzle where the Occupants attempt to communicate through a character via her own memories, lacking any other means of reaching her. Most of the time you'll be running through the clones' Orchard sanctuary trying to figure out where the heck anyone is with a woefully insufficient map, either trying to hunt down the one NPC that will further the story or every NPC for the sake of the game's more labor-intensive achievements (though you'll want to gather as much info anyway; the achievements here are really just serving their role of directing your attention to where the designers intend). It's a very dialogue-heavy game with a lot of context to sort through, making it a rewarding mystery to unpack for some and perhaps a bit of a long-winded drag for others. I'd argue that it's worth the mental investment but I also know anything this purposefully obtuse will only find a niche audience regardless.

1000xResist is a hard game to really talk about without delving into the particulars, which really need to be witnessed firsthand and in their entirety to get the most out of its story. I could point to a few things it reminds me of, even if I'm not one to delve too often into the heady and subtextual sci-fi it venerates (though I really should). Like the End of Evangelion movie and Iris's similar unwanted "chosen" role in deciding her world's fate as Shinji Ikari was in his. Or something like The Island, where clones are kept in an underground facility cut off from the rest of the world and indoctrinated into a bizarre belief system as a means to keep them compliant and harmonious. Or the British TV show Red Dwarf, which also explored what might happen if an insecure and self-loathing person happened to create and lead a nation of their own clones and how quickly that would fall apart. Or, sticking to games, the aforementioned Umurangi Generation or the equally odd and eerie "aliens trying to communicate" (and somewhat similarly lesbian-coded) sci-fi horror yarn Signalis. Yet, I dunno, this habit of mine to draw lines between a game and its evident inspirations might not be so readily applicable here, where an attempt was made to carve out something truly distinct. Its resonant themes of Iris's strict upbringing and her navigating school as an ethnic minority and the unfortunate adult decisions that such an unhappy childhood led to, its deeper mysteries about what actually went down with the Occupants and the infamous "Ancient Sister" clone that betrayed everyone, and its atypical and abstractive presentation are all designed to capture the imagination and create a connection between artist and observer, in much the same way that Watcher is frequently tasked to draw her own conclusions from the communions she witnesses despite a lack of firm data or understanding. The game has several endings and it's impossible to say which is correct: more that we let the vibes of this game wash over us and follow the thought processes they inspire to the conclusion that we deem the most germane. Real melonscratcher this one, is the TL;DR of all this (and if TL;DRs are a necessity, this is probably not the game for you).

Rating: 5 out of 5.