Consider this a public service announcement. If you like convincing post-apocalyptic worlds, incredible writing, a gripping story, gorgeous visuals, and the feeling that you’re playing something you’ve never experienced before, the best game of 2024 – and maybe longer – has just arrived on Steam. With thematic inspirations from Nier Automata, the fixed-camera exploration of classic Resident Evil, and an arresting anime-style aesthetic, somehow, the game of the year has attracted fewer than 100 players.
1000xResist is part dedicated story game, part RPG, and part unlike anything you’ve played in your life. After gigantic, almost god-like beings arrive on Earth, everybody is killed by a sudden, incurable disease – all except for one person, a young woman named Iris. Generations later, a new society and religion have been formed in Iris’ image. She is the seemingly benevolent ‘ALLMOTHER,’ and her clones maintain their underground world based on her teachings, and the roles they are assigned at birth. Once they reach a certain age and status, they are sent to the frontline, to accompany Iris in her centuries-long battle against the deific invaders. But nothing is as it seems.
Over 13 years of writing about videogames professionally, I’ve developed certain predilections and preconceptions – there are some games which, just by looking at them, I get an immediate sense they won’t be for me. On first appraisal, 1000xResist is not the kind of game that I would normally like.
On the contrary, it seems precisely the type of game that I have become automatically cautious towards. But this might be the best videogame story ever told, and developer Sunset Visitor has such a command of dialogue and characterization, and also staging, symbolism, and visual metaphor, that it all feels effortless and elegant.
I think a lot of videogame players are adamant in wanting better writing, greater originality, and more well-produced, small-budget games that serve as a creatively free alternative to the mainstream. 1000xResist is that game. Nevertheless, as I’m writing this, it has precisely ten concurrent players on Steam.
At its peak, 1000xResist attracted 107 simultaneously. Released on Thursday May 9, 1000xResist is available for $19.99 / £16.75. It will move you. It will shock you. It will reach out and speak to your own experiences of love, adulthood, and feeling adrift in the 21st century. If you like good videogames, you can get 1000xResist right here.
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