1000xRESIST

For the first two hours this looks like a stylish science-fiction adventure about clones serving a messianic figure in an underground city. Then it reorganises itself, and it keeps reorganising — chapters that recontextualise chapters, memories you inhabit as a different person, an entire section that reframes everything you assumed about who was speaking. Describing the plot beyond that does the game a disservice.

It is about diaspora, and it means it

Underneath the science fiction is a specific and unmistakably personal story about immigration, inherited trauma and the distance between a mother and a daughter who cannot use the same language for the same feeling. The clone premise is not a metaphor bolted on afterwards; it is the mechanism by which the game examines what gets passed down and what gets lost in the copy.

The writing is confident enough to sit in a scene for fifteen minutes with no music and no choices, and confident enough to know when that would be self-indulgent.

Chapters

9

Times the structure shifted

At least five

Hours before I understood the title

14

Direction over budget

This is made by a small team and it looks it in the character models and nowhere else. The camera work, editing and use of space are better than games with fifty times the funding — one chapter set almost entirely in a single hallway is staged with more precision than most films manage.

Where it slips

The traversal sections are weak. You walk, occasionally you climb, and none of it is interesting; the game seems to know, because it keeps them short. There is also a stretch in the middle chapters where the density of new terminology outpaces the explanation and I lost the thread for perhaps forty minutes.

The verdict

Sixteen hours and I have thought about it every week since. It asks for patience and attention rather than skill, and it repays both more completely than anything else on this site.

Go in knowing nothing. Do not read a plot summary, including a more detailed one than this.