Nothing Ever Happens, Nothing Ever Ends
Jan. 9th, 2025 01:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
utilitymonstergirlHistory has failed us, but no matter.
—Min Jin Lee, Pachinko
1000xRESIST is a brilliant, beautiful game, and has a specific moment where it went from merely admirable to gut-punchingly good. Discussing it will require spoiling a lot around the midpoint of the game, which is not the ideal state in which to play it.
For all of its fragmented time-hopping, the story of the game's first few chapters is fairly clear:
In 2047, Iris Kwan is the Canadian-born daughter of two former Hong Kong protesters. When she is inexplicably immune to an alien plague, masked troops take her to a lab to try making clones of her. They succeed, but after years of atrocity, Iris kills everyone in the facility through unknown means and starts raising five clones made on her own terms. All is well until the youngest makes a clone of her own, in the image of Iris's spurned friend Jiao. Iris kills it and revokes the clones' immunity except for the youngest, who is condemned to keep making clones they are pure enough to be forgiven. A thousand years later, all that remains of humanity is Iris- now the immortal tyrant Allmother- and her society of a few hundred clones.
By all accounts, this is the holding pattern at the end of history. The facility is getting creaky, the clones are getting weaker, and dissent is bubbling up from all directions. We know that the Allmother will die- the game opens with a flash-forward of her murder- and have no reason to believe that this world can survive without her. The story beats along the way are well-told but pretty straightforward: Iris's internalized xenophobia, the lab's casual atrocities, the straining of faith in the Allmother. A neat indie game, but my reaction has been more nodding than gasping.
We reach the prophesied moment. Watcher stabs Allmother, and there's a reveal that fellow lead clone Principal has been the ancient Youngest Sister all along, but so what?
...Then the game's startup logos reappear, drenched in blood. Then we wake up as a new character, another clone living in a tiny pastiche of an Asian city. Seven years have passed, and the world is now a police state with most of the old leadership nowhere to be found. History has refused to end.
The parallels to Hong Kong are clear- and later made explicit- but it's the worldbuilding of this part that blew me away. Revering the Allmother is now seen as a backwards anachronism, if not dangerously subversive. Cloning Jiao has gone from the ultimate transgression to a useful way to make an underclass. History's greatest villain has been recast as Watcher, even if it's become impolitic to care too much about her victim. There are plenty of smaller payoffs if you've been talking to the clones around the base - my favorite is the colorblind clone becoming Minister of Health.
Even in such a history-spanning narrative, we've gotten used to privileging the present-day parts as the "real world" with all other eras witnessed as censored, curated VR. Now, that dwindling cult is something people are nostalgic for, and its apologists are dying alarmingly often.
And yet this brave new world is no less stagnant. The leadership no longer even pays lip service to reclaiming the outside world; everything is in service of the Youngest Sister's power grab. The official doggerel has transformed from the Allmother's poem to a melodramatic play about how the Youngest Sister is her personally-anointed successor.
From here on out the story starts to focus on the logistics of revolution, as you attempt to wrangle Allmother cultists, disgruntled cops, Jiao clones, the old leadership, and partisans of all stripes into a functional coalition. While there are wrong choices, there aren't right ones - and the timeskip is vital for destabilizing your ideas of who's trustworthy. It's a brilliant stroke of storytelling, and I look forward to whatever Sunset Visitor makes next.
—Min Jin Lee, Pachinko
1000xRESIST is a brilliant, beautiful game, and has a specific moment where it went from merely admirable to gut-punchingly good. Discussing it will require spoiling a lot around the midpoint of the game, which is not the ideal state in which to play it.
For all of its fragmented time-hopping, the story of the game's first few chapters is fairly clear:
In 2047, Iris Kwan is the Canadian-born daughter of two former Hong Kong protesters. When she is inexplicably immune to an alien plague, masked troops take her to a lab to try making clones of her. They succeed, but after years of atrocity, Iris kills everyone in the facility through unknown means and starts raising five clones made on her own terms. All is well until the youngest makes a clone of her own, in the image of Iris's spurned friend Jiao. Iris kills it and revokes the clones' immunity except for the youngest, who is condemned to keep making clones they are pure enough to be forgiven. A thousand years later, all that remains of humanity is Iris- now the immortal tyrant Allmother- and her society of a few hundred clones.
By all accounts, this is the holding pattern at the end of history. The facility is getting creaky, the clones are getting weaker, and dissent is bubbling up from all directions. We know that the Allmother will die- the game opens with a flash-forward of her murder- and have no reason to believe that this world can survive without her. The story beats along the way are well-told but pretty straightforward: Iris's internalized xenophobia, the lab's casual atrocities, the straining of faith in the Allmother. A neat indie game, but my reaction has been more nodding than gasping.
We reach the prophesied moment. Watcher stabs Allmother, and there's a reveal that fellow lead clone Principal has been the ancient Youngest Sister all along, but so what?
...Then the game's startup logos reappear, drenched in blood. Then we wake up as a new character, another clone living in a tiny pastiche of an Asian city. Seven years have passed, and the world is now a police state with most of the old leadership nowhere to be found. History has refused to end.
The parallels to Hong Kong are clear- and later made explicit- but it's the worldbuilding of this part that blew me away. Revering the Allmother is now seen as a backwards anachronism, if not dangerously subversive. Cloning Jiao has gone from the ultimate transgression to a useful way to make an underclass. History's greatest villain has been recast as Watcher, even if it's become impolitic to care too much about her victim. There are plenty of smaller payoffs if you've been talking to the clones around the base - my favorite is the colorblind clone becoming Minister of Health.
Even in such a history-spanning narrative, we've gotten used to privileging the present-day parts as the "real world" with all other eras witnessed as censored, curated VR. Now, that dwindling cult is something people are nostalgic for, and its apologists are dying alarmingly often.
And yet this brave new world is no less stagnant. The leadership no longer even pays lip service to reclaiming the outside world; everything is in service of the Youngest Sister's power grab. The official doggerel has transformed from the Allmother's poem to a melodramatic play about how the Youngest Sister is her personally-anointed successor.
From here on out the story starts to focus on the logistics of revolution, as you attempt to wrangle Allmother cultists, disgruntled cops, Jiao clones, the old leadership, and partisans of all stripes into a functional coalition. While there are wrong choices, there aren't right ones - and the timeskip is vital for destabilizing your ideas of who's trustworthy. It's a brilliant stroke of storytelling, and I look forward to whatever Sunset Visitor makes next.
