Adventure Corner ~ 1000xRESIST
Welcome to Adventure Corner, a column where members of the RPGamer staff can give their thoughts, impressions, and pseudo-reviews for various adventure titles that don't come under our usual coverage. Adventure Corner is aimed at delivering opinions on a wide range of titles including visual novels, point-and-click adventures, investigative mysteries, and so forth.
In this edition of the column, we take a look at 1000xRESIST , a narrative-based sci-fi adventure game on PlayStation 5.
1000xRESIST
Platform: PS5
(also available on PC, Xbox Series X|S, Switch)
Release Date: 11.05.2025 (PS5 version)
Publisher: Fellow Traveler Games
Developer: Sunset Visitor
Official Page
Science fiction often focuses on elements of the world – technology or the environment – and critiques or examines them, while casting a mirror on humanity and our struggles to adapt to the changes around us. 1000xRESIST captures the essence of great sci-fi perfectly, and deals with a wide multitude of topics: cloning, plague, identity, trauma and cycles of abuse, assimilation, memory and information, and what it means to belong. It does so masterfully on every front, with an air of mystery throughout the entire experience, bolstered by outstanding presentation.
Taking place around 1000 years in the future, 1000xRESIST ’s prologue, titled Chapter [REDACTED], opens with the main character, a woman in blue named Watcher, menacingly approaching a praying woman named Iris in the halls of a futuristic train station. Based on the player’s choice, Watcher then recites a mysterious slogan before running up and assassinating Iris. At this point, the game flashes back, with Watcher promising to explain the events that led up to this moment. This opening sets 1000xRESIST 's tone perfectly; it's an enigmatic game that slowly reveals its hand, gradually drip-feeding players information about its world, while also being filled to the brim with cryptic poems, terminology, and backstory.
Flashing back to the past, players will quickly learn a few things about Watcher’s world – namely that she exists among a society of identical female clones, all birthed from the DNA of a single progenitor known to their society as the ALLMOTHER. Each of these clones is assigned a function and an accordant color, with one sister of each color becoming a head sister. Watcher, whose job is to observe, is blue; Bang Bang Fire, orange, is responsible for defense; Healer, who is pink, leads cloning and health, and so on. Together, all the sisters exist inside a sterile dome, sheltered from the outside world and wearing permanent masks to protect themselves from a virus that wiped out humanity in the distant past.
[caption id="attachment_181923" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The expanse of The Orchard, with its fake sky and Principal's red-tinted office towering over it.[/caption]
Inside this dome, known as The Orchard, the sisters collectively worship the ALLMOTHER, and it quickly becomes apparent that reverence is extremely dogmatic. The sisters frequently recite phrases from a poem written by the ALLMOTHER – “red to blue,” “six to one,” “sphere to square,” and “hair to hair” – each with some longstanding philosophical meaning. Punishment for improper veneration results in live incineration, leaving an overwhelming sense of tension, fear, and oppression that characterizes not only this section of the game but the whole experience.
With the basic setting and premise established, Watcher is tasked by one of the six head sisters, the red-colored Principal and leader of The Orchard, to investigate the memories of the ALLMOTHER through a process called “Communion” with her fellow head sisters. In these Communions, Watcher discovers the ALLMOTHER's origins, who was the daughter of immigrant parents. In the year 2047, the ALLMOTHER finds herself ready to graduate high school, but is alienated, struggling to relate to her parents, and lashing out at her peers around her, including a female exchange student from Hong Kong named Jiao, who is enamored with her. On the night of the final school dance, an alien-based pandemic breaks out, with headless, red creatures known as Occupants rapidly spreading a deadly disease that causes people to violently cry their bodily fluids out of their eyes until they die. However, the ALLMOTHER finds herself immune, and it is this immunity and the events of the past that set the stage for the bizarre future Watcher finds herself in.
[caption id="attachment_181927" align="aligncenter" width="640"] A brutal representation of the virus’s effects on a giant version of Jiao.[/caption]
Saying anything more about 1000xRESIST ’s plot is not only difficult, but risks spoiling the numerous twists, turns, and surprises that make it such a daring and engaging story – one that bears a striking resemblance to many recent, real-world challenges. The omnipresence of masks and the Occupant-originated pandemic is scarily evocative of the paranoia, fear, and death that gripped the world with the COVID-19 pandemic just a few years ago. Further, the ALLMOTHER and her parent’s backstories vividly explore themes of cultural assimilation, political persecution, and economic anxiety in a way that is surprisingly nuanced. At its highest points, 1000xRESIST is a shining beacon of storytelling, and it’s one of the boldest and most remarkably written stories in a video game, with profound, mature writing full of both depth and intrigue.
While the central plot later loses just a little bit of steam in its final chapters due to the complexity of its narrative and the difficulty of following all the various factions, 1000xRESIST never loses its razor-sharp focus on its themes of inheritance, memory, and cycles of abuse. Despite being a society of identical clones, the sisters of The Orchard still find themselves experiencing longstanding legacies of conflict, with some harrowing parallels to the past existing even a millennium later. As one character puts it, “we do not get to choose what we inherit.”
In navigating its outstanding story, 1000xRESIST is a hybrid experience. At some points, mainly in The Orchard, it’s more of a classic adventure game, with dialogue choices and free exploration. While The Orchard is breathtaking in its design, it can be somewhat difficult to navigate, especially because the in-game map is designed like a child's drawing. This difficulty of navigation sometimes extends to the Communions, and in later chapters, the in-game map for The Orchard becomes inaccessible, which makes it especially tough to get around if players are spacing out playthroughs and forget one of the hub's numerous twists and turns. Some of the Communion events have an interesting time travel mechanic, which integrates enjoyable light puzzle solving, while a few levels see Watcher jumping between floating anchored points around visually bizarre levels. At other times, it plays a little more like a visual novel, with a heavier focus on sequences of dialogue. Both modes do their job very well, though players should be ready for a lot of reading, as 1000xRESIST is a game that both demands and rewards attention.
[caption id="attachment_181928" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The Occupants loom large over the wreckage of the outside world.[/caption]
Presentation-wise, 1000xRESIST excels in a way that can best be described as doing a lot more with less, in a way that is quite evocative of Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne ’s environments. While it’s not going to win any awards for graphical fidelity, 1000xRESIST more than makes up for these shortcomings in its artistic and cinematographic direction. The Orchard is a splendidly creative and imposing piece of architecture, with its design oozing sterility, hostility, grandiosity, and even an odd sense of comfort at times. Along with the costume design of the sisters, some of the flashbacks in the Communion sections contain some truly striking uses of camera angles and color to keep players engaged and to amplify the intended emotion of the moment, be it tension, anxiety, or fear. The imposing designs of the Occupants and harrowing scenes of cities ruined by their reign of terror stand out as particularly gripping.
Of all its elements, the music of 1000xRESIST is the most surprising. The soundtrack is superb not only in terms of quality, but in its breadth as well. For a game that spans anywhere between ten to fifteen hours, it has nearly four hours of unique tracks, which blend a wide variety of warped, futuristic synthesizers, break beats, and pianos to craft a sound that varies from oppressive to melancholic. Frequent and smart use of dissonance punctuates its music, and even Communions that take players through dozens of different scenes are peppered with almost as many unique tracks. While the English voice acting isn’t quite up to the same level of quality as the music, it does its job adequately and sometimes is quite good, though a few key performances are a bit weak. Luckily, the strength of 1000xRESIST ’s writing makes up for any deficiencies in its voice acting, and none of the weaker performances ever hold back its narrative impact.
[caption id="attachment_181929" align="aligncenter" width="640"] 1000xRESIST cuts no corners with its striking camera angles and use of color.[/caption]
All in all, this is an experience that is clearly crafted with love, care, and attention to detail. Its writing, use of visual devices, and its narrative execution are some of the best in gaming. It brilliantly evokes and prudently comments on so many of the anxieties our modern world deals with and utilizes its setting and presentation to elevate its narrative elements to a stratospheric level. Along the way, there are multitudes of surprises, unexpected twists and turns, and some really outstanding characterization. While it requires a lot of attention and is quite layered in its writing, players who love a great story with a relatively short run time should definitely check out 1000xRESIST .
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