The thing with demos is that they’re tantalizing by design. Just a taste; a glimpse; a whiff of what might be to come. Demos can be wholly representative of a game, or they might be completely misleading – the so-called “vertical slice” of Aliens: Colonial Marines was nothing like the actual game upon release, and (maybe on a more positive note) ostensibly Hideo Kojima’s PT wouldn’t have been truly representative of his Silent Hills project either. Demos aren’t made to get you hooked on a game; that’s what the game itself is for. Demos are means by which we sample mechanics, see if the art style is to our taste, get a feel for the writing (though not necessarily the narrative or plot). On a more mechanistic level, demos are good to indicate whether a game might run on our systems, or to help the developers discover things that are and aren’t working infrastructurally before doing full beta tests or QA passes.
Why am I waxing philosophical about demos? Ultimately I think it’s because I find them challenging as a critic. When I know something is incomplete, purposely imperfect, my instinct is not to judge the thing too harshly. The whole point of a demo is that it isn’t done, it’s half-baked, it’s a work-in-progress for us to look at. They are meant to elicit first impressions.
In this sense, 1000xResist by sunset visitor 斜陽過客 is a perfect demo.
Broadly, 1000xResist is a psychological horror game focused on time, memory, technology and trauma. According to the game’s PR copy, we play as the Watcher, one of many clones of the last living – and possibly immortal? – human being known as the Allmother, or more colloquially, Iris. The Watcher is meant to dive into Iris’s memories to discover some as-yet unseen truth about the past, and in the process we have to fight off the very real manifestations of her harrowing life. Games like Silent Hill, Devotion, Signalis, and less urgently, Necrobarista come to mind – not just with regard to the game’s themes, but also aesthetically and mechanically, to a degree.
In order for the Watcher to successfully navigate Iris’s mind, she has to first learn what being a human being was like in our near-future of the 2040s. We’re talking bedrock-foundational stuff, like “what is a ‘name?’” and “what is a ‘phone?’” Here the writing mostly succeeds at juggling the naturalistic cadence of a group of northwestern US/southwest Canadian teens with the more formal, “robotic” language of the cloned Watcher and her guide, the Secretary, of which we only ever see a little Navi-like orb of light. This dichotomy lasts through the whole demo.
The big mechanical trick here is that we are able to “time travel” – though this is maybe a bit of a misnomer, as the Watcher isn’t really traveling through time but instead is cycling through a simulation of Iris’s memories. Still, the ability to move backward and forward in “time” by a day or two – adding or removing certain barriers to our movement in the process – was probably my favorite aspect of the demo. I’d like to see how this mechanic plays out in the main game, with potentially lots more “time” to play with.
Another mechanic that I’m less sold on was the segment where we grapple from spot to spot in a mostly-textureless void vaguely resembling a classroom, the roof of a school, a piano. The idea of floating through a particularly formless memory to get to its core and uncover new information is neat, but the execution leaves something to be desired. I’m also left wondering how impactful this mechanic will be later in the game, when we’re ostensibly not wandering through specifically teenage memories.
I left the demo really wanting to see how this game arrives at a fully playable state, if only to satisfy my curiosity about these mechanics and to actually experience the story as sunset visitor intends it. How prominent are the horror elements? What is the depth of the mystery? Hopefully we can get answers to these questions when the full game comes out sometime soon.
1000xResist is one of over 35 games with playable demos during LudoNarraCon, a weekend celebration of narrative-driven adventure games put on by Fellow Traveller. Starting today, May 4, at 12:00 PM CST, No Escape will be launching into full coverage of the festival. Follow us on Twitter @noescapevg, and if you enjoy this coverage, consider supporting the site at Patreon. Find out more about LudoNarraCon here.