1000xResist isn’t just mind-bending sci-fi — it’s also an allegory for diaspora
Sunset Visitor’s 1000xResist — a sci-fi adventure game released on May 9 — strikes at the heart of the experience of being born a child of immigrants, using generations of clones to tell the story of how we inherit our parents’ memories and must decide what to do with them.
The narrative centers on a cast of identical (but for their bright, anime-inspired uniforms) clones living in a quasi-utopian undersea society 1,000 years after humanity’s demise at the hands of a mysterious alien force known as the Occupants. All these clones come from a single source: Iris, who found immortality as a teenage girl and has lived hidden away for most of the millennium, save for her memories, which she passes down to her clones. That includes the game’s main protagonist, Watcher, whose assigned role is to observe and record Iris’ story for this new cloned generation.
Iris’ story begins with her memories of living at home with her parents, who are both immigrants who fled Hong Kong after the pro-democracy protests they participated in came to an end in 2019. They left home in search of safety and a new life free from political persecution, state-sanctioned violence, and imprisonment.
Iris repeats and replicates these memories, bringing them forward into the present, 1,000 years later. She passes them on to her many clones, who were produced in an effort to create a colony of survivors with potential immunity to the Occupants. You spend the game diving into and exploring Iris’ memories (first as Watcher, then later as another clone named Blue), many of which involve her impressions of her parents’ experiences and retellings of life as political refugees and immigrants in a new and unfamiliar country.
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In one flashback scene partway through the game, we see Iris’ parents reflecting on their past in the midst of the devastation caused by the Occupants. Her mother wonders if the costs were worth it. “What was the point?” she asks. “It wasn’t just about winning,” her father
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