Table of Contents
Meta Review
This game is one of the hardest pieces of media to review for me. I’ve spent a full week thinking about how I want to write this review – what my thoughts on the game are, themes, mechanics, graphical fidelity etc. I still feel like I don’t have a full grasp on this particular game.
Part of it is that I haven’t reviewed a video game in a long time and the rest is that this game is just really weird and outside the usual genre purview of games I play. With that said, I still have a few thoughts about the game so let’s get into it.
Mechanics
1000xRESIST is a 3D visual novel with a sci-fi adventure narrative. As such, it has more mechanics than a 2D visual novel would. You move your character around in a 3D space (for the most part). There is nothing particularly novel about the mechanics in this game, the movement is all fairly bog standard stuff. There is no combat, just traversal.
The most criticism of the game I have is that for large chunks of the game, the game throws you into this environment and asks you to walk/run around the map talking to characters. This in itself would be fine if not for how goddamn confusing it is to navigate this space. I genuinely got lost in the space trying to to get to place. The rudimentary map doesn’t help much.
I think I would have enjoyed the game a lot more if the navigation around the game world wasn’t so tedious.
Narrative
Coming into this game, the one thing that I kept hearing was that this game had an excellent narrative. Well. Technically, I think yes, the narrative is very well written and paced with interesting characters, twists, and stakes. Thematically, its tackling themes like the struggles of first generation immigrants, resistance and revolution.
I took in all of those elements and came out at the end of the game not feeling…anything. I can tell why other people greatly enjoyed this game but I don’t think I did. For me, just technical merit is not enough for me to enjoy narrative, I need the narrative to make feel something. It doesn’t matter the emotion.
I think this game’s narrative is a case of “I understand why other people enjoy it but it doesn’t work for me.”. I don’t think it is bad or good. It is just a narrative that didn’t resonate with me. That happens sometimes.
Conclusions
I think that if you are someone who enjoys a strong, well written narrative in a video game you should give 1000xRESIST a shot. It is definitely the weirdest and most interesting video game narrative I’ve experienced in a while.
I can’t say I enjoyed the game but I did not dislike my time with either.
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