1000xResist is an allegory for the diaspora

Sunset Visitors 1000xResistance – a sci-fi adventure game released on May 9 – takes the experience of being born to immigrants very seriously. It uses generations of clones to tell the story of how we inherit our parents’ memories and must decide what to do with them.

The narrative centers on a group of identical (except for their colorful, anime-inspired uniforms) clones living in a quasi-utopian underwater society 1,000 years after the destruction of humanity by a mysterious alien force known as the Occupants. All of these clones come from a single source: Iris, who gained immortality as a teenager and has lived in hiding for most of the millennium, except for her memories, which she passes on to her clones. This includes the game’s main protagonist, Watcher, whose job it is to observe and record Iris’s history for this new generation of clones.

Image: Visitor of the sunset Passerby/fellow traveler of the setting sun

Iris’ story begins with her memories of life at home with her parents, both immigrants who fled Hong Kong after the pro-democracy protests they had participated in ended in 2019. They left home in search of safety and a new life free from political persecution, state-sanctioned violence and imprisonment.

Iris replays and replicates these memories, bringing them to the present 1,000 years later. She passes them on to her many clones, created in an effort to create a colony of survivors with potential immunity to the Occupants. You spend the game delving into and exploring Iris’ memories (first as a Watcher, then later as another clone named Blue), many of which include her impressions of her parents’ experiences and retellings of their lives as political refugees and immigrants in a new and unfamiliar land.

In a flashback midway through the game, we see Iris’ parents reflecting on their past amid the devastation caused by the occupiers. Her mother wonders if the cost was worth it. “What was the point?” she asks. “It wasn’t just about winning,” her father replies. “If we had kept quiet and not fought back, they would have said it was always like that… that’s what people wanted. No. They can’t say that. Because history has recorded that we resisted fiercely. That we fought for a different future until we couldn’t anymore. That legacy lives on in us.”

[Ed. note: The rest of this article contains full spoilers for the ending of 1000xResist.]

Iris’s clone colony lives in a huge ship hidden on the sea floor. These clones have never seen the surface or other living people. But they still have memories of Hong Kong, affection for the city and the musings about whether leaving home was the right decision. They have Iris’s fragmented dreams, their own thoughts about home, her parents and her origins.

Eventually, it is revealed that the apocalypse occurred when the Occupants – an alien species attracted to our sadness and trauma – attempted to record and immortalize human memories to use as a source of food. In doing so, they unwittingly consumed humanity: when the Occupants reveal their trauma, people begin to cry and cannot stop. Their bodies die, hollow and desiccated – but their memories live on in the Occupants. These eternal memories in the form of endless dreams come at the expense of our living world.

Those who grow up with immigrant parents live in an uneasy embrace of old dreams and memories. When these parents leave the countries where they were born, they often leave something behind. They often become alienated from their families, their own parents, the homes they grew up in, the neighborhoods they knew, their system of meaning, their religion, their gods.

Their children then experience these memories of loss secondhand, as memories of a memory. These memories are not necessarily ours, as children of immigrants, but we can’t help but hold them in our minds. We leaf through family photo albums, we watch home videos of familiar-looking streets and skylines; we recognize in them a sense of home that is made a little eerie by our distance.

In my mother’s closet hang rows of old VHS tapes from family reunions in her home country of Tunisia. They are places of memory and emotion, but they are frozen in time and detached from the lives we lead today and what we must plan for the future. The characters in 1000xResistance

Just as Iris’ parents are leaving Hong Kong and everything they know, Iris decides to leave home. She separates from her overprotective parents and joins the government soldiers and scientists who take her to an underwater laboratory where she can be studied and eventually cloned. Eventually she runs again, willingly, into the arms of the alien occupiers who promise to give her the strength to break away from her parents, but they will also take something away from her. She will live on, but in an eternity of unresolved trauma, in a kind of limbo – she will not grow, will not move forward, but will forever look back.

We all repeat at least some of our parents’ mistakes at some point. It’s inevitable. We grow up the same way, many of the same patterns are second nature to us, and yet we think we’ll do things differently this time. As Iris’s father tells her, “We can’t choose what we inherit.”

Image: Visitor of the sunset Passerby/fellow traveler of the setting sun

We see this in the choices Iris makes. She punishes the first Guardian for disobediently taking the initiative and creating his own clone, just as Iris’ mother punished her for wanting to do things her own way. Iris then goes into hiding and evades the difficult task of parenting, just as her dream father often did, leaving the task of disciplining to others.

The memories and behaviors we inherit can have a debilitating effect on us to some extent, especially if we don’t process them or recognize our own part in them. Iris and her clones live in the colossal shadow of a world that no longer exists, replaying painful old memories in a compulsive loop, escaping and becoming endlessly withdrawn.

The game teaches us that to truly grow and become something distinct and new, we must leave our memories in the past. Held in the timeless embrace of the Occupants, Iris cannot leave her past behind, cannot leave her dreams behind. She is haunted by unprocessed memories, and so are her clones. She spreads the haunting like an infection. The memories become residue, cancer, growing and multiplying, burdening their hosts.

The inmates do not act out of hostility. They inadvertently destroy people by separating them from their memories, which live on in immortal stasis. But memories, like mortal life, are meant to pass away. They grow richer because we must actively grasp them, like the fleeting threads of a dream that disappear from our memory when we leave our bed. Life is precious because it is fleeting and ephemeral.

At the end of 1000xResistanceSecretary, a split element of the original Occupant, returns with the clones to his original host after 1,000 years. In this millennium, Secretary learns many things from humanity, especially the transience of life and the inevitability of death. He realizes that this fading and flawed eternity in which Iris and her clones are trapped has long since passed its expiration date and must find a merciful end.

One chooses to risk venturing onto the unknown surface rather than staying with the ghosts buried beneath. These remaining clones, free of Iris’s all-consuming memories, must learn to leave the past behind while continuing to cherish and learn from it. Children must learn to create their own memories while carrying the harsh lessons of their parents with them.

1000xResistance finds the kernel of hope in a future full of compromise and failure. It shows us how protest movements can fail, how capitalism and state power will do their best to destroy us. But it also shows us that running away, escaping into a fantasy world, wrapped in the arms of an eternal, unreal past, is not life. We must accept the past as past, while understanding that we will always carry a part of it with us as we step into the uncertain future.