Some spoilers for the game below, beware!
“Just be grateful that you get to say goodbye” – Knower
1000xRESIST by Sunset Traveler is a fascinating game to explain in words. It’s a game that might be personal or foreign to the average player. It’s a game that contains many layers of storytelling that this medium has been striving for, and yet it feels linear enough to see through the childish drawings that act as the velvet curtains to the other side.
But that line above tripped me up so badly, that I still think of it sometimes. It’s brutally honest and for me, it’s a definitive answer to a feeling I had built up since January, of loss and what might have been up to that point.
In the game, our main protagonist, Watcher, was saying goodbye to her sister, Fixer, as she moved on towards something else and one of her other Sisters said the line as a way to comfort Watcher. Yet, it got to me due to the similarities to what I experienced earlier this year, and the knowledge of getting to say goodbye at that moment in time, sometimes does feel like a luxury.
And it is a repeated occurrence as well, of not getting to say goodbye before that person is gone forever. All within the very first explorable location with the AllMother’s best friend, and even their own parents as well, with the Watcher coming to see the aftermath of their relationship being reduced to either a singular form, or even as a fading memory of her superior’s past. It feels poetic as that word in the beginning does resonate quite well when you dive deeper into the game.
But, perhaps I am looking into things that feel unrelated, hoping to catch something that isn’t there at all. Maybe it’s my way of categorizing my grief when that simple line came up and the repressed memories came out, unraveling at the seams, so to speak.
But really, what I would actually recommend to people who are reading this short feature and feeling confused about this, is to play this game. It is well worth the hype in gold and it just so happens to resonate to me in the deepest of levels that most other games would have dreamed off.
1000xRESIST is out now on PC and Nintendo Switch.