1000xRESIST review — The bad kids stay, the good kids go

One thousand years after everything ended, only one human remains alive. There are many of her, but the original is known as ALLMOTHER. Her sisters live apart from her in the Orchard, serving Her Grace in hopes of one day being called to see her. However, nothing in this society is as it seems. You are Watcher, and you will slay ALLMOTHER, but first you must observe Her past.

1000xResist is one of those games you should play completely blind. It’s a narrative adventure, which aren’t for everyone, but if you like good stories just check out the score at the bottom and you’ll see what I mean. I really don’t want to spoil anything about this game, because putting it all together yourself is a big part of the fun. I’ll try and keep this short if you need a bit more to go on.

Most of what you do in 1000xResist is talk to people, but the game can be divided into two distinct phases: Exploring the Orchard, and Communion. When exploring the Orchard, you’re free to walk around the maze-like environment, speak to other sisters, and eventually talk to whoever you need to to advance the story. There’s a lot of worldbuilding here and even minor characters have some small character arcs, so I’d highly recommend speaking to everyone before moving on. All dialogue is fully voiced, and you can bring up a compass to see who’s left to talk to. It can be frustrating to navigate without a map, especially to certain places like the stage, which is really my only big complaint about the game.

Eventually, you’ll enter a Communion with one of the main characters. Here, you explore ALLMOTHER’s memories to discover how the world ended and what happened after. You often have multiple moments in time to explore the same place, and you can swap between timelines using LB and RB. For example, you might need to get into the High School cafetera in the past, but it’s blocked off. To work around that, you can head to a point in the future where the block is removed, then head back in time once you’re past.

Other times, the memories might be more fragmented. Using the left trigger, you can slow down time and point towards a glowing node to slingshot in that direction. Usually, these are straightforward in the path you need to take, but as you progress things get more complicated with multiple routes. It’s a neat method of traversal, and makes the Communions feel appropriately dream-like.

Something I think people might find offputting is the lack of lip synching or much facial expression on the characters. It certainly weirded me out at first, but eventually I just forgot about it as the voice acting does a great job of conveying emotion. I think the game looks great for its budget, focusing on style where it really counts and accentuating that with some amazing music. This is an indie game and there’s a LOT of dialogue, so I’ll cut them some slack in that department. I also had some trouble getting my 8bitdo controller to work with the game, but an Xbox controller worked just fine. Still, these are small potatoes in a game that is full of heart and dense with meaning.

Putting together what the game is really about – in the sense of what real life things it’s trying to say – is pretty easy. This is not a subtle game, but seeing that message come to its conclusion is still satisfying. I’ve played a lot of games trying to be about something very specific, and most of them forget about the actual plot the game is about in favor of focusing entirely on metaphor, but 1000xResist manages to bring both to a fantastic conclusion. This is a game that I’ll be thinking about for a long, long time.

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