Backlog Bingo 2025: 1000xResist

Yeah, this one is just a lot of unfocused frothing honestly. Cold 5/5.

It is...somewhat difficult to talk about this game without spoilers, so I'm not even going to attempt to do so; if you're reading this and you're one of the animals in my life who is also playing this game this year, might wanna give this one a pass for a bit!

Okay, so, now that that's out of the way: I finished this on February 1st, and I am reasonably comfortable saying that this will be my favorite thing that I play in 2025...and also I have almost no idea how to talk about it.

This game is unbelievably laser-targeted at me, though I can imagine having been even more called out directly by it were I Chinese. It is textually plural, subtextually sapphic, subtextually trans, and very explicitly a story about found family, surviving the apocalypse, who does or does not deserve forgiveness, COVID, the politics of Hong Kong, oppresive states, time travel; there is a lot going on here.

VERY roughly, 1000xResist is the story of a girl named Iris, the only immune survivor of a pandemic that wipes out everyone. She eventually clones herself six times into six "sisters", who perform functions and eventually create more clones that they pass those functions down to. This is...about as un-spoilery as I can be: the story unfolds extremely nonlinearly, and piecing together who is involved, what happened, when, how, why, is much of the draw here, but...it's also just uniquely captivating, for reasons that I cannot quite enumerate, other than "it's laser-targeted at me in a way that I love"?

Ammy, Dragon Quarter Defender — 1/26/25, 5:53 PM Starting 1000xResist over here

Ammy, Dragon Quarter Defender — 1/26/25, 6:01 PM I've stayed completely blind on this and this is immediately captivating

The above Discord interaction took eight minutes. In just...vaguely frothing at a visiting metamour about my playthrough, they started playing as well, also immediately settling into "this game is exactly my thing and I need to finish this", and in the process of our mutual frothing, our mutual partner has also decided to play it later. It hurt me, in that way that good art does. It's one of the best gaming experiences I've had in a while, and this is a lot for me to say about a game that has very minimal gameplay. It is, cover to cover, that compelling.

The penultimate scene of the game, roughly, sees you making a ton of choices that I will not go into; several of these apparently lead directly to bad endings, but the game textually says the moral equivalent of "hey uh maybe that's a bad idea", so I also think it's completely reasonable to get to one of the two "actually rolls credits" true endings without a guide (as I did, going back to grab the bad ends on youtube after). In doing so, a character summarizes your choices directly to you, resulting in, for me:

You have chosen a future that casts aside the knife for more difficult incisions; that aspires to new instruments but leaves you vulnerable; that faces past wrongs head on, no matter the cost; that seeks to persist on the surface, regardless of the unknown and the possibility for pain; that recognizes past contributions and to go more slowly; that allows for comfort in tradition at the risk of docility; that will do what must be done in order to survive, regardless of the soul; that relentlessly seeks justice for those ignored; that will try to reconcile those two desires; that wants to understand and believes no one is beyond forgiveness; that remembers where you came from, knowing you can never fully connect to it.

I cry more post-transition than I ever could in the pre-HRT anhedonic haze that I was steeping in for years, such that "did this game make Ammy cry" is a reasonable approximating metric for if something's likely to hit the 5/5 bar. (Of my two 5s from last year, this actually only has a 50% hit rate, because Void Stranger didn't make me cry; this is honestly fairly rare of things that end up this highly rated.) It would have earned its 5 anyway, but, though I had not before this point, this bit of the epilogue finally did break me.

You have chosen a future that casts aside the knife for more difficult incisions; that aspires to new instruments but leaves you vulnerable...

The above dialogue box is one long sentence separated by ellipses, across a text box every time I wrote a semicolon. I made it as far as that aspires to new instruments but leaves you vulnerable before crying, but the rest...isn't much less of a deep read on me in a lot of ways? I could have attained a true ending without this exact block of dialogue (though the first four sentences are fixes, so I was always cooked: all four of the possible "other" choices, You have chosen a future that will ready the knife..., ...that retains an unstable structure for future force..., ...that abandons your previous transgressions in the name of utility..., and ...that stays inside and only desires the present, finding grace in what already exists... are immediate bad ends), but...this felt right. I got it first, I read the myriad other options available on the wiki after the fact. Making the choices I felt like my character would have made not only led directly to the game handing me its best ending but also led to me feeling...so very seen? In a way few things have in a while. I read those four alternate sentences and...no, no, that's not me, I would not want that, I do not want those. I do not, to say nothing of my player character.

I cannot recommend this more highly to anyone who doesn't mind if a game isn't wall-to-wall crunchy mechanics. I barely even talk about the actual game mechanics here: they do not matter. I want so many more people to play this than did. 5/5, zero notes other than the multiple paragraphs of raving that you have just read.