1000xRESIST is a narrative sci-fi adventure game about Watcher, a clone of ALLMOTHER, the figure they worship, goes uncover the memories of their dear ALLMOTHER to find out the truth of Iris, the person before becoming the religious figure of those clones, the truth of humanity, and the truth of the world those clones are live in. In a pure mechanical standpoint, this game has gameplay loop of move around, talking to people, go back and forth between ALLMOTHER memories, and that’s it. It’s dead simple gameplay loop and yet, sunset visitor 斜陽過客 was effective using those mechanics to make player feels everything the player character are feeling through its story about resist a lie, resist the conventional standard, resist the social normalcy and resist a loop of mistake.

A lot of game designers obsessed with mechanical emergent storytelling, tried to use every emergent gameplay part to turn into emergent storytelling that was really personal to player and make everyone has their own story, their own adventure, but these kind of emergent gameplay and storytelling have their own limitation in both mechanically and emotionally. The real reason we love stories isn’t exactly emotional personal to players, but emotionally thoughtful and diversity that touch deeply to players, despite the players and the playable character are totally different. That’s why narrative adventure games like 1000xRESIST are important and interesting, because it resists the conventional idea revolution in video game storytelling. Despite its simple core gameplay loop, you are allowed to experience the story through playing with it as Watcher, see everything as Watcher and feel everything as Watcher. Turn this into a book or movie are fine, but you wouldn’t get the press talk and accept to listen to the person you’re talking to, run around the very surreal environment, and feel every emotion through the controller. Even with the cutscenes, which were extremely static because of the low budget, sunset visitor 斜陽過客 framed these scenes effectively to evoke the emotion from players, resisted to limited themselves because of the budget limited. This alone could make a lot of AAA games jealous for how boring their cutscenes were framing, despite these are the most use tool in video game storytelling. And despite the low poly 3D and the lack of detail in environment, the dev resists to allow those limitation stop them expressing their unique artistic expression. There are no AAA sci-fi games have the same level of artistic expression like 1000xRESIST, the surreal feeling in environment, and yet still feel very dear to a lot of players.

1000xRESIST is a game about resistance of the conventional in any sense. Resist a lie, resist the social normalcy, resist a loop of mistake and resist to let the past define ourselves. And that resistance might be stubborn to some people, but the exact resistance like this makes 1000xRESIST an unique, one of its kind, memorable video game experience.