1000xResist Review
1000xResist tackles so many different themes that it is hard to process all of them in a single playthrough, yet the ones that you do process stick with you.
1000xResist is a game that can feel overwhelming at times as there are so many things it is trying to say. Yet while the game tackles a variety of so many different themes that can go by so quickly that you may not even notice them, the themes that you do get will stick with you. In this game, you play as a character called the watcher who is known as a sister in a world that has been stricken by a pandemic in which people die of having so much so much water flows out of your eyes. You are one of the survivors in a society believed to be created by the Allmother who is perceived as a god-like being who created beings known as the sisters after the pandemic destroyed much of the world. The Allmother is also seen by the sisters as someone who can protect them from the occupants who wish to destroy them and their way of life. While in this society created by the Allmother, the main sisters you meet along the way are called the Fixer, the Knower, the Healer, Bang Bang Fire and the Principal. One of the themes the game tackles that you can pick up on quickly is the role of religion and whether it is good or bad for a society. Is the belief in an Allmother a good thing because it gives people hope in dark times and some needed purpose in their lives or is it a bad thing as it gives people a false hope to cling to as well as a way of preventing people from finding a purpose by and for themselves. Another theme the game touches on is authoritarianism and how to preserve what you have against a force that is stronger than you and has the power to take away everything from you if it wants to. The game communicates this theme by integrating the Hong Kong protests from 2019-2020 into its narrative in which the people of Hong Kong protested against changes to their government from mainland China and mainland China responded by cracking down hard on Hong Kong.
Other themes that 1000xResist talks about are numerous and can be listed here. When living in a new place how much of your culture do you preserve versus how much should you assimilate to the culture around you? How does one healthily improve their own self-esteem and self-worth when they feel inferior to someone else and are the victim of bullying? Is it ever ethical to subject someone to torture? If so, what forms of torture are acceptable and what forms of torture are not acceptable? Is it acceptable to cause harm if it prevents a greater harm from being committed in the future, even if you are causing some harm in the first place? This is just the start of the questions that the game asks but doesn’t answer.
As for the gameplay, it can be primarily defined as an adventure game with some minor action elements. The largest section of the gameplay is walking from place to place and talking to people with a smaller element of gameplay using ring-shaped objects from place to place. There are also a few puzzles in the game that are pretty simple to figure out through trial and error. The only problem this game has is that the map and compass you are given in the game is not satisfactory enough in pointing you down the right path that you want to go in open-ended areas. There is this one open-ended area you go back to a lot throughout the game that allows you to talk to multiple different NPCs that suffers because of this.
In the end, this is primarily a story driven game, and the reason people will be playing this game is because of its story. The gameplay is in service to its story and as a result is fairly simple and straightforward so that it won’t get in the way of the story it is telling. So, then it is a good thing that the story in 1000xResist is as good and interesting as it is.
1000xResist can currently be played on Nintendo Switch and PC at the time of this writing.
Score: 8/10