Sundown Customer’s 1000xResist — a sci-fi journey sport launched on Might 9 — strikes on the coronary heart of the expertise of being born a toddler of immigrants, utilizing generations of clones to inform the story of how we inherit our dad and mom’ reminiscences and should determine what to do with them.
The narrative facilities on a forged of equivalent (however for his or her vivid, anime-inspired uniforms) clones dwelling in a quasi-utopian undersea society 1,000 years after humanity’s demise by the hands of a mysterious alien power referred to as the Occupants. All these clones come from a single supply: Iris, who discovered immortality as a teenage lady and has lived hidden away for many of the millennium, save for her reminiscences, which she passes all the way down to her clones. That features the sport’s fundamental protagonist, Watcher, whose assigned function is to look at and file Iris’ story for this new cloned technology.
Iris’ story begins together with her reminiscences of dwelling at dwelling together with her dad and mom, who’re each immigrants who fled Hong Kong after the pro-democracy protests they participated in got here to an finish in 2019. They left dwelling looking for security and a brand new life free from political persecution, state-sanctioned violence, and imprisonment.
Iris repeats and replicates these reminiscences, bringing them ahead into the current, 1,000 years later. She passes them on to her many clones, who had been produced in an effort to create a colony of survivors with potential immunity to the Occupants. You spend the sport diving into and exploring Iris’ reminiscences (first as Watcher, then later as one other clone named Blue), a lot of which contain her impressions of her dad and mom’ experiences and retellings of life as political refugees and immigrants in a brand new and unfamiliar nation.
In a single flashback scene partway by means of the sport, we see Iris’ dad and mom reflecting on their previous within the midst of the devastation attributable to the Occupants. Her mom wonders if the prices had been price it. “What was the purpose?” she asks. “It wasn’t nearly profitable,” her father responds. “If we stayed silent, didn’t get up for ourselves, they’d say that is the way it at all times was… that is what the folks needed. No. They’ll’t say that. As a result of it has gone down in historical past, that we resisted fiercely. That we fought for a unique future, till we couldn’t. That legacy lives in us.”
[Ed. note: The rest of this article contains full spoilers for the ending of 1000xResist.]
Iris’ colony of clones lives in an enormous vessel hidden on the backside of the ocean. These clones have by no means seen the floor, nor another dwelling people. But they nonetheless inherit the reminiscence of Hong Kong, the love for it, the rumination over whether or not leaving dwelling was the best selection. They inherit Iris’ fragmented desires, her personal ideas of dwelling, of her dad and mom, of the place she got here from.
It’s ultimately revealed that the apocalypse occurred when the Occupants — an alien species drawn to our disappointment and trauma — tried to file and immortalize human reminiscences to make use of them as a type of sustenance. They unknowingly consumed humanity within the course of: When the Occupants expose their trauma, the people start to cry and can’t cease. Their our bodies die, hole and desiccated — however their reminiscences dwell on within the Occupants. These everlasting reminiscences, within the type of never-ending desires, come at the price of our dwelling world.
Rising up with immigrant dad and mom means dwelling in an uneasy embrace of previous desires and older reminiscences. When these dad and mom depart the international locations the place they had been born, they typically depart one thing behind. Typically they turn into estranged from their households, their very own dad and mom, the houses they grew up in, the neighborhoods they had been conversant in, their which means methods, their faith, their gods.
Their youngsters then expertise these reminiscences of loss secondhand, as reminiscences of a reminiscence. These reminiscences don’t essentially belong to us, as youngsters of immigrants, however we will’t assist however maintain them in thoughts. We glance by means of household picture albums, we watch dwelling movies of familiar-looking streets and skylines; we acknowledge a sense of dwelling in them, one that’s made barely uncanny by our distance.
In my mom’s closet are rows of previous VHS tapes of household gatherings again in her mom nation, Tunisia. They’re websites of remembrance and emotion, however they’re suspended in time, and disconnected from the lives we dwell at present and what we should plan for sooner or later. Seeing the characters in 1000xResist have interaction with the deeply nested legacies of those that got here earlier than them evokes the sensation I get when fascinated about these tapes saved in that dusty previous closet.
Simply as Iris’ dad and mom depart Hong Kong and all the pieces they know, Iris chooses to go away her dwelling, splitting away from her overbearing dad and mom to affix the federal government troopers and scientists who will whisk her away to the undersea lab the place she may be studied and ultimately cloned. Ultimately she runs once more, willingly into the arms of the alien Occupants, who promise to empower her to face aside from her dad and mom, however they are going to take one thing away as effectively. She is going to dwell on, however inside an eternity of unprocessed trauma, in a sort of suspended animation — not rising, not transferring ahead, however wanting again, endlessly.
All of us wind up repeating no less than a few of our dad and mom’ errors. It’s an inevitability. We develop in a lot the identical methods, with lots of the similar patterns baked in, and but we expect that, this time round, we’ll do issues otherwise. Like Iris’ father tells her: “We don’t get to decide on what we inherit.”
We see this manifested within the choices Iris makes. She punishes the primary Watcher for disobediently taking her personal initiative and creating her personal clone, simply as Iris’ mom punished her for desirous to do issues her personal approach. Iris then hides herself away, eradicating herself from the onerous process of parenting, simply as her dreamer of a father typically did, leaving the duty of disciplining to others.
There’s an extent to which the reminiscences and behaviors we inherit, particularly after we keep away from processing them or seeing our personal half in them, may be stultifying. Iris and her clones dwell within the colossal shadow of a world that not exists, enjoying by means of painful previous reminiscences in a compulsive loop, fleeing and being drawn again endlessly.
The sport teaches us that to really develop, to turn into one thing separate and new, we’ve got to go away our reminiscences previously. Iris, held within the timeless embrace of the Occupants, can’t transfer on from her previous, can’t step exterior of her desires. She is haunted by unprocessed reminiscences, and so are her clones. She spreads the haunting like an an infection. The reminiscences turn into vestigial, cancerous, rising and multiplying, weighing down their hosts.
The Occupants aren’t appearing out of any sense of hostility. They inadvertently destroy the people by separating them from their reminiscences, which proceed on in deathless stasis. However reminiscence, like mortal life, is meant to fade away. It’s made richer as a result of it’s one thing we’ve got to actively grasp at, just like the ephemeral threads of a dream slipping from our minds as we depart our beds. Life is valuable as a result of it’s momentary and fleeting.
On the finish of 1000xResist, Secretary, a split-off factor of the unique Occupant, joins again with its unique host after 1,000 years with the clones. Over that millennium, Secretary learns many issues from humanity, chief amongst them the momentary nature of life and the inevitability of loss of life. It comes to grasp that this fading and flawed eternity that Iris and her clones have been trapped in has lengthy since drifted previous its expiration date, and should come to a merciful finish.
The selection is made to threat venturing out onto the unknown floor, relatively than remaining with the ghosts buried under. These remaining clones, free from Iris’ all-eclipsing reminiscences, should learn to depart the previous behind, whereas persevering with to cherish and study from it. Kids should learn to make their very own reminiscences, whereas bringing the onerous classes realized by their dad and mom with them.
1000xResist locates the kernel of hope inside a future filled with compromise and failures. It exhibits us how protest actions might fail, how capitalism and state energy will do their greatest to crush us. However it additionally exhibits us that operating away, escaping right into a fantasy, wrapped within the arms of some everlasting, unreal previous, is not any solution to dwell. We should settle for the previous as gone, whereas understanding that we are going to at all times deliver part of it with us as we stroll ahead into the unsure future.