One of my biggest gaming regrets was not playing Vanillaware’s time-travel narrative adventure 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim when it was released in 2019. Everybody around me kept telling me to just pick up the damn game and give it a try because they knew I would like it. I didn’t play it until 2023, at which point I quickly smacked myself over the head because it was absolutely my type of game.
So I’m happy to say that I got in on the ground floor with 1000xRESIST —another “extremely my shit” game—out on May 9 for PC and Nintendo Switch. I know I would regret sleeping on this twisting experimental narrative, so I’m here to make sure you don’t make that mistake.
Beginning at what appears to be the end, 1000xRESIST is a story-driven adventure about time and identity. You are Watcher, one of many clones, and one of the first things you witness is your character killing a former ally over some ideological impasse. But without much context, you have to go back to the start to learn how Watcher gets to that point.
Following a nearly world-ending pandemic (wow, can’t imagine what that’s like), a society consisting entirely of clones of a being they call ALLMOTHER lives within a bunker as they seek to fight off the aliens that caused the end of the world. Every clone is given a name, but not in the traditional sense. These aren’t monikers that determine one’s individuality. Rather, they are called functions and denote the role of a given clone in society.
Watcher’s role is to observe the memories of ALLMOTHER, who was once a girl named Iris who lived during the height of the pandemic. That starts by visiting the high school of the ALLMOTHER, whose real name was Iris. Traversing through the school at different points in time becomes a fascinating way to explore the cause and effect of 1000xRESIST’s inciting incidents. In the present, Watcher finds a courtyard filled with graves, but go back in time and suddenly it’s full of students gossiping about the upcoming dance. It’s a wonderfully executed—if morbid— meditation on how ephemeral life is, but also how our minds can’t help but revisit events in our lives over and over again.
In the case of ALLMOTHER, those oft-revisited memories aren’t very happy. Despite being nearly a god to her army of clones as ALLMOTHER, Iris was a flawed woman dealing with human problems. Xenophobic hate from fellow students who blame her for the spreading disease, as well as feelings toward a female classmate she doesn’t know quite how to handle, lead Iris to make a lot of mistakes. What emerges is a nuanced and surprisingly compelling portrait of a person that is so much more than what the sisters’ idea of the ALLMOTHER first leads you to expect. Learning more about Iris and how she became the ALLMOTHER gets you invested in the larger story, and drives you forward to keep exploring its mysteries.
As she shifts across different time periods to explore the world and these scenarios, Watcher sometimes encounters conversations so emotionally charged and pivotal that she is pulled into a distortion of time and space. These liminal environments are often stark white and filled with giant floating furniture, turning the game into a puzzle platformer with hints of Gravity Rush, in which you must fling Watcher through space to specific floating points. It’s a more action-driven engagement that helps break up what could be a tiring bombardment of dialogue.
However, the dialogue in 1000xRESIST is anything but boring. Despite the game’s gorgeous stylized world and interesting time and space-bending mechanics, 1000xRESIST is a narrative game first and foremost. It’s an ambitious story touching on deeply philosophical questions surrounding identity. In a literal sense, it’s about Watcher and the other clones struggling with existence as part of a collective rather than as individuals. Metaphorically, however, it’s about coming to terms with your own identity as something that shifts and changes over time. You are not the person you were at any other point in time. This is all propelled with precision by the game’s sharp dialogue, which explores heady themes but never feels too overbearing.
The game’s first five hours evoke shades of NieR: Automata and 13 Sentinels, while developer sunset visitor 斜陽過客 has cited even more expansive inspirations on social media. It’s a stylish amalgamation of artistic sensibilities that has been nothing but exceptional during my time with it. I can’t wait to see what else 1000xRESIST has in store for me.
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