A Story That Makes You Fight to Turn the Page

I don’t really know how to review video games. It certainly doesn’t seem as though anyone else does, either, given that the review process—when it hasn’t been delegated to the thumbs up and down of the masses—generally begins with “is it fun” and ends with “is it long enough to justify paying twenty bucks.” It’s strange, given that we have the format down for basically every other medium. There’s something about the act of consuming a video game, the time demands or the difficulty, that makes people more territorial, more selective than other forms of art. When people say they like movies, they may have a preferred genre, but nobody only watches war movies, or romcoms. Same with books, or music—they may hate a particular subsection, horror or rap or country, but we accept that a review or criticism can take those works on their own merits. A movie review of a western doesn’t say “four out of five stars, because there aren’t enough explosions,” but a video game review will absolutely dock a work for what it isn’t, even when it isn’t trying to be.

In other words, 1000xRESIST, a 2024 game from rookie developer Sunset Visitor, got a lot of glowing 4-out-of-5 reviews, and Metacritic helpfully threw them all in the blender and spat out a “generally favorable” 86. This review won’t add to that number. Instead, I’ll use criticism to do the only thing I know how: to share the stuff I love with people, and think about what made me love it. 

One thing reviews have to do is to summarize, so let’s get that out of the way. The genre: narrative-driven third-person adventure game with negligible puzzle or gameplay elements, beyond a few traversal sections. It’s a story you play, by moving the character and talking to people. It is not “fun” in the sense that games apparently have to be, and all other forms of art rather clearly do not. 

The story, avoiding major spoilers: You are Watcher, a woman living with your identical twin sisters in an underground bunker, wearing masks to avoid dying of a mysterious disease brought by aliens in an extinction event. You are Iris, a high school senior trying to escape the grip of your overbearing mother and the ties of your second-generation culture, having moved/fled from Hong Kong across the Pacific and then into your own personal afterlife. You are Blue, a random nobody working a dead-end job in the underground below the underground, born into a caste system designed to maintain order without bothering to explain what that order is for. You are the player, turning the pages of a story that wants to make you work for it.

That story is confident, taking wide swings that touch on motherhood, politics, adolescence, suicide, social obligation, individualism, cowardice and bravery. Its characters represent elements of revolution and revolt—the Hong Kong protests of 2019-20 are central to the game’s themes, and its anti-totalitarian message is more powerful and direct than anything that might have gotten Devotion delisted—and yet they still act as human characters, at times touching or tragic or infuriating. That’s a product both of the game’s expertly written script, as well as the excellent voice acting that serves to create separate essences for a group of characters who are, largely, clones. Even the tertiary characters are fleshed out, and they have to be—they’re the ones who will wind up bleeding out on the ground. The dead are the most important characters of all, what the story and what the idea of resistance stand on.

To summarize: 1000xRESIST is fantastic, and you should play it. Like so many good books and movies, and so few games, you will think about it long after it’s done. It will make you want to turn the page, to trip the next flag. Not just to know what happens, but to feel it.

Now that we have the basic review of the game out of the way, and established that it is good, it’s worth devoting some time to what makes it interesting.

My son is not usually a literal person. He loves to make jokes, and split a delighted grin for that half second between when he’s uttered the joke and when the recipient has gotten it. But at age 10, he is the younger kid, and that means that he spends a lot of time catching up to the stuff on the television screen aimed to older audiences. He’s doing his own form of analysis: asking questions, trying to understand motivation and character. But because he has so many of the basic blocks to lay down in his understanding, because there are so many questions with finite answers that evade him, it makes him a profoundly literal consumer of art. Who is that person? Why are they angry? He can’t tell the difference between what he doesn’t get, and what hasn’t been given to him.  

1000xRESIST makes two conscious choices with regards to its storytelling. The first is that the game offers very little in the way of player input. Your only commands are to move, talk, and to occasionally use floating points on the map to fly. The movement isn’t designed to enhance gameplay; it’s there to give the setting a weight, and a familiarity, missing from the diorama views of standard visual novels. You have to feel the passage of time as you move from place to place, watch your surroundings change. But the talking is the key here. This isn’t a game with branching paths, or a morality system. You’re given several options for how to respond, but much like the excellent Adios, your character often says something other than what you direct it to. Lack of choice is a vital element to the narrative—it’s a game about struggling to earn freedom, after all—and the game doesn’t need to muddy up its message, bending to how you want your protagonist to act. You play as a character who, befitting the name Watcher, can only witness predetermined scenes from the past; you, as the player, can expect no more yourself.

The other important aspect to the game is that it refuses to hand-feed, even for the poor 10-year-old who just wants to know what’s going on. For a generation brought up on the TV Tropes, online bulletin board era of media criticism, 1000xRESIST responds like Charles Barkley throwing out elbows after a rebound. It tells its story in fragments, swapping out perspectives and even protagonists without explanation or even warning. The opening cut scene of the game reveals a woman stabbing another woman through the heart; as the game opens, you are treated to the discovery that you are playing the murderer. Half the game is spent returning to that moment, and then the other half is necessary to clarify the motive. 

Other loose ends are left untied, in a way that clearly frustrated some players. The fate of one major character is left completely unresolved, in a way that would make some scream “plot hole.” But the game didn’t want to tell that story, and so it didn’t. There needs to be a world beyond what we see; sometimes we don’t get to know. Sometimes we have to decide for ourselves. You get the story, I tell my son, and then you decide what to do with it. That’s the bargain between the author and the audience. 

While the game would have made a fine novel, there is one other button on the controller that makes it a particularly good use of video game. When “watching” past events, the player is sometimes given the option to tap the shoulder buttons. This causes the avatar to move forward or backward in time, while remaining in the same physical location. This is occasionally used as a solution for puzzles, particularly early on, but its primary use is to further fragment the story, forcing the player to move back and forth, arrange pieces of plot. 

This is what makes 1000xRESIST more of a game than so many titles with more “gameplay.” Take, for example, the infamous speeder bike level of Battletoads. That’s a game that’s theoretically more “fun,” offering far more interactivity: You can move, you can jump, you can punch, you can fall into a pit and die, over and over. The game tests your reflexes. And yet ultimately, that level (and so many others) is simply the installation of muscle memory, of copying code into the fingertips and executing the macro. There is more action in Battletoads, but there is more expression and creativity in gathering and synthesizing the narrative of a complicated story. Reading and watching and learning are all puzzle games. Most of them aren’t any more challenging than the first level of Kirby’s Adventure. But my son, from the breakfast table, came away from his time with 1000xRESIST utterly satisfied, happy to have played the game, despite not having pressed the buttons. He figured it out, like an adventure game puzzle without all the trial and error.

Games have the opportunity to do this in a way that movies, in particular, often don’t. They’re not trapped in the same commercial framework of the feature film, or the three-act play. The presence of gameplay—either physical or mental—can allow them license to get truly weird with the story. Another recent example, and another of my son’s favorites, is Anthology of the Killer. Games can uniquely afford to be experimental with one aspect of their design while fulfilling another, offering weird narrative alongside pleasant gameplay, or the opposite. It’s a shame, then, that video game reviews see every game as an empty container, to be filled with equal parts graphics, gameplay, replayability, and fun. It’s not something we demand of other art; until we unlearn that, we’re going to be missing out.