If I asked you to pack a single backpack to leave home with, how would you fill it?
Perhaps you’d take your favorite shirt. Maybe your earbuds or headphones and a phone charger. You could take an extra pair of socks, because cold feet suck. A diary. Your laptop. A sketchbook. A plushie you’ve loved for a while. How do you prioritize what fits in the backpack? What truly matters to you? Form? Function? Nostalgia?
More importantly, what doesn’t fit in the backpack?
1000xRESIST is a game about the past, and how it influences, shapes, and twists the future. It asks you the question above very early on into its runtime, and keeps you thinking about the question all the way until the very end. It makes you wonder (and perhaps worry about) how much the past changes our futures, both personally and societally.
You play as Watcher, one of many Sisters who are raised in service to a singular, godlike ALLMOTHER. You live in the Orchard, hiding underground from an alien threat, the Occupants, who brought a terrible and deadly disease to Earth when they arrived a thousand years ago — only the ALLMOTHER survived. Now, you train to be chosen, to join the fight against the Occupants and retake the surface. Your duty as a Watcher is to know the memories of the ALLMOTHER, and to experience them. Through this, you begin to see more than you bargained for — enough to threaten the entire Orchard, and the ALLMOTHER herself.
1000xRESIST is the first game by Asian-Canadian and indie studio, Sunset Visitor, based out of Vancouver. It’s been nominated for multiple awards, including three GDC Award categories in 2025, four D.I.C.E. Awards, and the Golden Joystick Award for “Best Storytelling” in 2024. (If you prefer the voice of the people, it’s “Overwhelmingly Positive” with 2,540 reviews on Steam.)
The game itself, if I may be so coy, is “a movie you play.” It plays mainly, though not entirely, through dialogue and exploration, for which the voice acting and striking art do wonders. While there are some stumbles, the voice actors knock the ball out of the park for the majority of the game. The writing is well-paced and complex, leaving the player always wanting more. Though the graphics and gameplay are not the point of the game, the camera angles and framing are cinematically oriented and engaging nonetheless.
The game, in the end (and I won’t spoil anything, don’t worry), asks the player the question one last time: What doesn’t fit in the backpack? Do you get to choose what you inherit? Do you choose what gets passed on? If you are given that choice, can you truly make it? It brings into question the ethics of forgiving, forgetting, and moving on. It distills and concentrates the real-life practice of processing and working through trauma, turning it into something as simple as switching the lights off — or leaving them on. It makes the player not only think about the consequences of their actions in-game (yes, there are multiple endings, tee-hee), but also examine what they keep with them in their day-to-day lives. It causes them to wonder why they’ve kept it and where keeping it has led them. The game bleeds into real life in the way only video games can, and that’s why it’s placed securely in my backpack.
