1000xResist: 2024 GOTY

Explaining 1000 X Resist to anyone who hasn’t played it is difficult. It isn’t hard to explain the objective components, its Sunsets Visitors first game, it’s a sci-fi 3D visual novel/adventure game, its developers come from a performance art background and that shows in the visual presentation, writing and themes. But components and objective facts ignore the main reason to discuss it. A knot of ideas so complex and so tightly wound that any attempt to untangle it just pulls it tighter. You cannot isolate one thread because each thread is connected to another thread, and another, and another until you get lost or leave where you entered. This article, written for cohost.org, explores some of these threads, mainly the ideas around Asian Diaspora and the Hong Kong riots, something the writer is much more qualified than me to discuss.

You can pull at the thread of generational trauma, discuss the knock on effects of police brutality, watching your city crumble as the protestors slowly, painfully fail. Having to flee the country because the police noticed you participated and started to harass you. The struggles of assimilating into an unfamiliar culture while looking after your child. Iris’s parents are hurt by the Hong Kong protests in 2019, this cut is deepened by the grandmother, who decides to go no contact with Iris’s mother, as she feels abandoned by her daughter for foolish ideals. This pain and trauma manifests in two ways. The father is non confrontational and doesn’t like to argue or punish Iris but is also very protective of her. Leading Iris to feel infantilised, while the mother goes the opposite way, she loves Iris, but is strict, sometimes to the point of seeming cold or bitter, and frequently uses physical violence to punish Iris, telling the father to spank her with a feather duster after she kills her pet gerbil in the microwave when she is very young, it is implied she may have had emotional issues as a child, but it’s equally likely she thought her gerbil was cold in the winter and her intentions were innocent but led to a sad outcome. Iris dealing with corporate punishment and being infantilised by her overprotective parents leads her to abandoning them for the 50, a group of people trying to find a cure for the disease lefty by a group of aliens known as occupants. This decision to leave upsets both parents, but makes the mother especially bitter, now being abandoned by her own mother and her child. These grudges built over time eventually severing the relationship entirely. Iris promises them both she will return, all 3 of them know she won’t.

Iris’s trauma doesn’t end when she joins the 50. Iris is immune to the disease, chosen by the aliens due to the strong emotions she and the people around her produce. They take as many samples as they can to try and clone her, so humanity may live on free of the disease threatening to end it. We see glimpses of the tests and experiments Iris goes through but we don’t see much, most of it redacted, so private even the most devout of her clones don’t see the memories. We see almost everyone Iris knew at their best and worst, but even this trauma is a little too raw to take out the box. This is not the first time Iris betrays someone trust in her though. Jiao, a younger Chinese immigrant who is still struggling to acclimatise to everything new around her, tries to befriend Iris and she is very cold and mean in return. Belittling Jiao for mixing her languages up, being embarrassed to be around her. Jiao is persistent though, going so far as to at some point try and imitate Iris in hair style and fashion, which is a little creepy. She eventually asks Iris to go to the school dance near the end of the year, and is killed during an occupant invasion.

Retroactively, Iris misses Jiao dearly. While with the 50 she risks a bunch of their lives to go back to the school and visit Jiao’s memorial site, something many of the members were unhappy with, but was approved by one of the leaders, potentially in an attempt to keep her happy. Iris wishes she was kinder to her while she was here, we don’t see many memories of Iris’ other friends, if she had any, so clearly Jiao is the most important one of them all to her.

You pull at the thread and it loosens.

Iris eventually finds out she can communicate and work with the occupants, and uses this to kill all the members of the 50 after years of experiments and isolation. It’s not the end of humanity, they have already figured out how to clone Iris and keep the immunity. It is Iris’ turn to play god. She creates 5 sisters and gives them all coloured suits and functions, Healer, Fixer, Bang Bang Fire, Knower and Watcher. All of these sisters are Iris’ children and she initially acts as their mother, giving them support when they need guidance, but also leaves them to their own devices quite a bit, giving them the freedom she didn’t have. These sisters are immune and should theoretically live very long lives. Iris has a clear favourite, watcher, also known as youngest. Her function is to simply observe, and this makes her the outcast compared to the other four sisters, who have more immediately useful and practical jobs. Iris offers emotional support when she can, but is bad at punishing the sisters for bullying her, and later on when the stress and trauma catch up to her, she becomes emotionally unavailable, sleepwalking and mumbling just like her mother did as a response to the police brutality she endured in HK. Youngest is isolated from the society she belongs to, similar to the struggle to assimilate into a new culture when immigrating to a new country.

The four other sisters are especially mean to Youngest one night, exploiting her poor eyesight and weak prescription glasses to hide from her, disguising it as a game of hide and seek. Thinking to herself sometime after this, Youngest decides to do something drastic, clone a Jiao from a hair in an old notebook Iris left. Iris has told all of them that cloning is her function and hers alone. Cloning using this hair works like it would from a monkey’s paw, clone Jiao is deformed, the flesh barely held together, one eye almost falling out its socket. On Iris’ birthday, the sisters start to apologise for how they’ve treated Youngest, they explain her eyesight can be fixed with stronger glasses, apologise for ditching her, and promise to include her more often in future hangouts. Youngest accepts this but is also excited to show her mother her work and devotion to her, as you can imagine this doesn’t go down well. Presenting the gift triggers Iris’ flight or fight reactions, as if an old trauma has been ripped out of its box when it wasn’t ready to be reawakened. The Jiao clone is cut down in a flash, throat slit within seconds. Her birthday party halts while she screams at Youngest, demanding to know what her intentions are, questioning her loyalty and her love and demanding punishment. The other four sisters seem to step in here and ask Iris to calm down, it was intended as a gift, she was trying to make you happy. Iris interprets this as a betrayal from them all, so extends the punishment to all of them.

The sisters are stripped of their immunity, all except youngest dying in a struggle to fight the disease, Iris abandons youngest and permanently moves to the other side, a part of the station only available via trains, and becomes the ALLMOTHER. Her poetry from her childhood becomes gospel, greeting, and goodbye, sisters are more devoted to their functions, traitors are supposedly incinerated and the ALLMOTHER is a god only the most devout sisters see. An extra role is added to the list, principal, the second in command to ALLMOTHER who watches over the sisters in the orchard while the mother communes on the other side. Iris was not a good mother, she was an immortal teenager with unhealed trauma, several scars still forming. She was playing god to escape the isolation of being a lone survivor in an apocalypse, searching for companionship by playing dolls with clones made in her image. The perceived betrayal by her sisters, and maybe also the realisation she was too harsh, leading her to step back and distance herself so she cannot be hurt or hurt again.

Violence as a reaction to violence as a reaction to violence. A chain reaction of events leading to pain inflicted by and towards every generation of this family.

There is a new thread

Iris, called the ‘AllMother’ by her clones, is the leader of her society of clones for an indescribable amount of time, likely 1000 years or more. This dictatorship is very culty. AllMother is worshipped, her birthday is a day of major celebration, all her words are over analysed to extract meaning that doesn’t exist. Youngest is treated like Satan from the Adam and Eve story, a serpent with silver words who tempts all who are willing to hear. A sense of false positivity parades over the place, calling each other sister, trying to treat each other as one big family, the use of the Allmothers words in greetings and goodbyes. I am unsure of the specificity of the stance the game is taking here, whether its a critique of religion as a concept, or the modern institution of religion, or just specifically cults, evangelicals and dictators who abuse religion for selfish goals, but there’s so many lines of dialogue that made me go ‘these clones are in a cult’ that it can’t just be a coincidence. The specificity of the criticism is uncertain, but the actual criticism is clear, taking religion this far is not healthy, expression is limited, many sisters have to hide or soften their real thoughts in fear of punishment or gossip spreading, a challenge to the status quo is met with force, incineration in the worst case scenarios. Modern democracy is flawed and corrupt but this only serves a few while equally or more restrictive on the many.

In this cult future you play as Watcher, a sister who has just been promoted to her function. You are tasked with communing with the other sisters and learning of the all mothers past. Your first communion, with principal, is disrupted by Fixer, a close friend, potentially a partner of Watchers who recently left for the other side. She warns watcher mother is not to be trusted, that she has betrayed all the sisters and has some awful secrets. Watcher berates Fixer for the betrayal, and reports her to principal afterwards. Fixer is Incinerated for her crimes…Well, that’s what the sisters say, we don’t see Fixer’s body, we don’t see her burned at the stake, we just get some drawings that depict the event from the AllMothers perspective. Watcher assumes Fixer is dead because she trusts her sisters, she trusts Principal and she trusts the AllMother. The sisters have mixed feelings over this, Healer thinks Watcher should have turned the other cheek, Knower also does not like the outcome but understands watchers position, Principal is happy Watcher is so devoted to the AllMother. This is not a decision any of them take lightly, whether they agree with watchers actions or wished she’d found a different way, they all grieve.

Over the course of the first half of the game, Watcher takes part in communions with other sisters, essentially dream sequences of Iris’s past, including the betrayal and stripping of immunity. This enrages Watcher, how many sisters died needlessly because one woman wanted to play god and punish a sinner. ‘There is no feeling worth getting incinerated over’ Says Knower. Right before Watcher finds out about the communion with the occupants, an attack wipes out many sisters. It happens during a big celebration, a new Fixer being announced, a mirror of the Attack Iris faced at her school dance. Visions of her sisters dying in so much pain while knowing AllMother is communicating and negotiating with the aliens only pours more petrol on Watchers rage Watcher ignores the advice of her older sisters and attacks AllMother anyway. This was all part of a plan by Principal, who is revealed to be Youngest. Watcher has been set up to take the fall for AllMo’s murder while Principal gets to take control in the power vacuum and get her revenge, a bitter grudge she has held for millenia.

Principal betrayed her mother, just as Iris betrayed hers by abandoning her, the cycle continues for one more generation. That next generation is blue, a Miscellaneous sister, essentially a second class citizen in Principals militaristic fascism, oppressed by the military, known as the reds. She’s working under Bartender, the woman who used to run the club during watchers time, she is also running a small bar in the town of Miscellaneous, making cocktails out of ingredients of the not legal variety. In this section you don’t get a lot of hard, cold info of how the Miscs are treated by the reds, but the vibe is there, there is almost always a miscellaneous on the corner watching in case the reds push their luck. Other rebellion groups you eventually meet talk in metaphors until they know they are alone and then become extremely blunt with their thoughts and ideas.

Watcher becomes an extremist when she metaphorically loses her parent, Iris is still alive, but the woman she idolised turned out to be far worse than even her worst nightmare could imagine, the image in her head of the perfect leader degraded into a rude teenager then degraded further until nothing Watcher admired was left. Blue is drawn to action by a literal loss, Bartender being shot and killed by the Reds, not for any particular crime but for holding dangerous ideas, clinging on too hard to the old ways. Blue becomes the new barkeep and along with several other rebellion groups commits a more bold attack than Watcher, a bomb set up in the cake on the AllMothers anniversary, intending to kill Principal when she gets close. The scene after Blue first sees Barkeeper dead is incredible, blurry vision, mind racing, hard to focus on anything, your objective changing every 30 seconds. At first you want to lie down, go to bed and cry, then blue becomes angry, she wants to kill the reds that committed this crime, revenge must be taken, she has to find the miscellaneous who can help her get inside and burn it to the ground.

Allmothers rule was insidious because of the poetry and faith and sisterhood. Flowery language and familial bonds sound nice until you realise they are forced upon you and the alternative is an incinerator. Principal’s Government is equally immoral, but opposing because of the lack of the disguise. It is bleak and violent and simple, do what the military and its leaders say or risk getting beat and shot. Sunset Visitor hammer this point in when Blue runs away from the explosion she sets off. As she runs away from the red guard, flashes of the HK Protests from a 1000 years ago come into Blues view, time seeming to blend the two events seamlessly together. Iris’ Parents fought for their freedom in 2019, Blue is fighting for hers 1000’s of years in the future.

In one of the most brain bending moments in the game, Watchers helper secretary appears, and helps you get out of the communion. This whole time blue and Watcher have been communioning together, sharing memories. You wake up on a train with the sisters watcher knew, Bang Bang Fire, Healer and Fixer, who is also not dead, the incineration did not occur, ALLMOTHER lied about catching and killing fixer to keep everyone fearful and devout to the cause. Watcher has been replaying the events of her life so far over and over again, 1000’s of times in an almost 24/7 communion that has been destroying her health and left her essentially in a coma. Iris and her Mother both slept walk from the trauma they suffered, and now Watcher is sleep walking as well, less in the literal way, more walking in a dream, trying to find what went wrong and how she could fix it. To find out that all the events up to this point have been a kind of prequel is a really cool twist that has you second guessing where the final stretch of the game could go.

The end has a nearness and its gravity is echoing

In the final acts of the game we take on a heist style plan to have Secretary take over a nearby occupant and rewrite history to remove all the fascist military. This act of the game is where we get a lot of info about the 50 and the occupants. This is where we learn how occupants work and why most people die, we see why they choose Iris as the sole survivor, we see how the 50 survived in the ship and the mutiny that happened. The 50 were ultimately not prepared for the level of threat they were facing. Of the 50 stations created only 2 made it to the bottom of the ocean before the occupants got them, and we don’t hear much from the second as communication is down. This unpreparedness combined with growing dissatisfaction with leadership and their general leadership leads to a bloody and violent mutiny from a small number of guards, yet another group who take action against their leaders out of desperation.

Your little squad is not the only group involved in influencing the decision, while Blue will have final say, all the factions that helped you set up the cake bomb want a slice. The new Jiao clones want to have equal or greater power than the Iris clones, some sisters still believe in the AllMother and want to go back to her teachings. Almost every major stance you could take on both of the rulers of this society are explored here. You will be chewing and digesting each faction’s stance while finishing the final chapter, maybe you agree with the Jiaos desire for equal rights, but can they be trusted to not take total power and recreate the unequal society but flipped, with Iris’s being second class? Maybe you think Allmother was nicer than Principal, but is that the better option over trying something new?

The final choices of the game are simple, secretary has control of the occupant and you now get to decide who gets to be remembered in history, and who is forgotten, this will affect past attempts, and it’s here that 1000 X Resist proudly makes a statement, almost all of the endings in which you keep the red guard or other fascistic factions all end in you and the other resistant members being swiftly shot, a short bad ending that immediately takes you back to the choice so you can make a better one. The game confidently states that allowing dictators, fascists and other forms of evil to exist and/or be in power is a terrible idea that will end badly for everyone. You have to remove bad actors from a society in order to progress and evolve. It’s not a mind blowing statement or revolutionary thought, but it is incredibly poignant in a time where people are very divided and alt right personalities have gained huge traction thanks to internet algorithms bringing swathes of nihilistic or disenfranchised young men into their wing.

The brilliance of the game’s writing is that it conveys very strong emotions through the influence of poetry and theatre, providing a lot of weight to very little words, but is also about so many ideas and themes that relate to each other and are discussed in such detail despite a lot of focus going towards more poetic language.You can deep dive into the way the game philosophises about time like in Jacob Gellers Essay or discuss the philosophy of the Occupants and how they handle memory. Being honest, you could almost pull an idea about anything from the game it’s so dense, womanhood, life as an immigrant, LGBTQ+ relationships, grief and loss of loved ones. You could tie it to real world events or anecdotal events from your family and friends and almost all of it would have merit. Every thread pulled takes you to a different thread over and over until you’ve looped back around to your original point. You understand the knot a bit better, but you’re no closer to untying it.