Sunset visitors 1000x resistance – a science fiction adventure game released on May 9 – gets to the heart of the experience of being born to immigrants, using generations of cloning to tell the story of how we inherit our parents’ memories and must decide what we have to do with it. them.
The story revolves around a cast of identical (but due to their bright, anime-inspired uniforms) clones living in a quasi-utopian undersea society, 1,000 years after humanity’s demise by a mysterious alien force known as the Occupants. All these clones come from one source: Iris, who found immortality as a teenager and has lived hidden away for most of the millennium, except for her memories, which she passes on to her clones. That includes the game’s protagonist, Watcher, whose role is to observe and record Iris’ story for this new cloned generation.
Image: sunset visitor 斜陽過客/Fellow Traveler
Iris’s story begins with her memories of living at home with her parents, both immigrants who fled Hong Kong after the pro-democracy protests they participated in ended in 2019. They left their home in search of safety and a new life. free from political persecution, state-sanctioned violence and imprisonment.
Iris repeats and replicates these memories and brings them to the present, 1000 years later. She passes them on to her many clones, which are produced in an attempt to create a colony of survivors with potential immunity to the Occupiers. You spend the game delving into and exploring Iris’s memories (first as Watcher, then as another clone named Blue), many of which involve her impressions of her parents’ experiences and retellings of life as political refugees and immigrants in a new and unknown world. country.
In a flashback scene midway through the game, we see Iris’s parents reflect on their past amid the destruction 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 responds. “If we were silent and didn’t stand up for ourselves, they would say: this is how it always was… this is what people wanted. No. They can’t say that. Because it has gone down in history that we fiercely opposed this. That we fought for a different future, until we couldn’t anymore. That legacy lives in us.”
(Ed. remark: The rest of this article contains full spoilers before the end of 1000x resistance.)
Iris’s colony of clones lives in a giant ship hidden at the bottom of the ocean. These clones have never seen the surface, nor any other living human. Yet they still inherit the memory of Hong Kong, the affection for it, the reflection on whether leaving home was the right choice. They inherit Iris’s fragmented dreams, her own thoughts about home, about her parents, about where she came from.
Ultimately, it is revealed that the apocalypse occurred when the Occupants – an alien species drawn to our grief and trauma – attempted to capture and immortalize human memories to use them as a form of sustenance. In doing so, they unknowingly consumed humanity: when the residents expose their trauma, the people start crying and cannot stop. Their bodies die, hollow and desiccated – but their memories live on in the Residents. These eternal memories, in the form of endless dreams, come at the expense of our living world.
Growing up with immigrant parents means living in an uneasy embrace of old dreams and older memories. When these parents leave the country 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 were familiar with, their systems of meaning, their religion, their gods.
Their children then experience these memories of loss secondhand, as reminders of a memory. These memories are not necessarily ours, as children of immigrants, but we cannot help but keep them in mind. We look through family photo albums, we watch home videos of famous streets and skylines; we recognize in it a feeling of home, a feeling made somewhat eerie by our distance.
In my mother’s closet are rows of old VHS tapes from family gatherings in her native country, Tunisia. They are places of memory and emotion, but they are suspended in time and disconnected from the lives we live today and from what we need to plan for the future. Seeing the characters 1000x resistance dealing with the deep-seated legacies of those who came before them evokes the feeling I get when I think of the tapes stored in that dusty old closet.
Just as Iris’s parents leave Hong Kong and all they know, Iris decides to leave her home and separate herself from her overbearing parents to join the government soldiers and scientists who will take her to the undersea laboratory where she can be studied and ultimately cloned. . Ultimately, she willingly runs back into the arms of the alien Residents, who promise to give her the power to break free from her parents, but they will also take something away. She will live on, but within an eternity of unresolved trauma, in a kind of suspended animation – not growing, not moving forward, but forever looking back.
Ultimately, we all repeat at least some of our parents’ mistakes. It’s an inevitability. We’re growing in much the same way, with many of the same patterns in them, and yet we think we’ll do things differently this time. As Iris’s father tells her: “We don’t get to choose what we inherit.”
Image: sunset visitor 斜陽過客/Fellow Traveler
We see this reflected in the decisions Iris makes. She punishes the first Watcher for disobediently taking her own initiative and creating her own clone, just as Iris’ mother punished her for wanting to do things her own way. Iris then hides and withdraws from the arduous task of parenthood, just as her dreamer of a father often did, leaving the task of disciplining to others.
There is a degree to which the memories and behaviors we inherit, especially if we avoid processing them or seeing our own part in them, can be stultifying. Iris and her clones live in the colossal shadow of a world that no longer exists, playing through painful old memories in a compulsive loop, fleeing and endlessly withdrawn.
The game teaches us that to really grow, to become something different and new, we must leave our memories in the past. Iris, held in the timeless embrace of the Residents, cannot leave her past behind, cannot step out of her dreams. She is haunted by unresolved memories, and so are her clones. She spreads the ghost like an infection. The memories become vestigial, cancerous, growing and multiplying, placing a heavy burden on their hosts.
The Occupiers do not act out of any sense of hostility. They unintentionally destroy the people by separating them from their memories, which persist in immortal stasis. But memory, like mortal life, is supposed to fade. It is made richer because it is something we must actively grasp, like the ephemeral threads of a dream that slip from our minds as we leave our bed. Life is precious because it is short-lived and fleeting.
At the end of 1000x resistanceThe Secretary, a split-off element from the original inhabitant, rejoins his original host with the clones after 1,000 years. During that millennium, Secretary learns many things about humanity, the most important of which are the temporary nature of life and the inevitability of death. It begins to understand that this fading and flawed eternity in which Iris and her clones are trapped is long past its expiration date and must come to a merciful end.
The choice is made to risk venturing onto the unknown surface, rather than stay with the ghosts buried beneath. These remaining clones, free from Iris’s obscuring memories, must learn to put the past behind them while continuing to cherish and learn from it. Children must learn how to make their own memories, carrying with them the harsh lessons of their parents.
1000x resistance locates the core of hope in a future full of compromises and failures. It shows us how protest movements can fail, how capitalism and state power will do their best to crush us. But it also shows us that running away, escaping into a fantasy, wrapped in the arms of an eternal, unreal past, is no way to live. We must accept the past as gone, while understanding that we will always take a part of it with us as we face the uncertain future.