Sunset Visitor’s 1000xResist — a sci-fi adventure game released on May 9 — strikes at the heart of the experience of being born a child of immigrants, using 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 cast of identical (but for their bright, anime-inspired uniforms) clones living in a quasi-utopian undersea society 1,000 years after humanity’s demise at the hands of a mysterious alien force known as the Occupants. All these clones come from a single source: Iris, who found immortality as a teenage girl and has lived hidden away for most of the millennium, save for her memories, which she passes down to her clones. That includes the game’s main protagonist, Watcher, whose assigned role is to observe and record Iris’ story for this new cloned generation.
Iris’ story begins with her memories of living at home with her parents, who are both immigrants who fled Hong Kong after the pro-democracy protests they participated in came to an end in 2019. They left home in search of safety and a new life free from political persecution, state-sanctioned violence, and imprisonment.
Iris repeats and replicates these memories, bringing them forward into the present, 1,000 years later. She passes them on to her many clones, who were produced in an effort to create a colony of survivors with potential immunity to the Occupants. You spend the game diving into and exploring Iris’ memories (first as Watcher, then later 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 unfamiliar country.
In one flashback scene partway through the game, we see Iris’ parents reflecting on their past in the midst of the devastation caused by the Occupants. Her mother wonders if the costs were worth it. “What was the point?” she asks. “It wasn’t just about winning,” her father responds. “If we stayed silent, didn’t stand up for ourselves, they would say this is how it always was… this is what the people wanted. No. They can’t say that. Because it has gone down in history, that we resisted fiercely. That we fought for a different future, until 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 a giant vessel hidden at the bottom of the ocean. These clones have never seen the surface, nor any other living humans. Yet they still inherit the memory of Hong Kong, the affection for it, the rumination over whether leaving home was the right choice. They inherit Iris’ fragmented dreams, her own thoughts of home, of her parents, of where she came from.
It’s eventually revealed that the apocalypse occurred when the Occupants — an alien species drawn to our sadness and trauma — attempted to record and immortalize human memories to use them as a form of sustenance. They unknowingly consumed humanity in the process: When the Occupants expose their trauma, the humans 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 unending dreams, come at the cost 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 countries where they were born, they often leave something behind. Often they become estranged from their families, their own parents, the homes they grew up in, the neighborhoods they were familiar with, their meaning systems, their religion, their gods.
Their children then experience these memories of loss secondhand, as memories of a memory. These memories don’t necessarily belong to us, as children of immigrants, but we can’t help but hold them in mind. We look through family photo albums, we watch home videos of familiar-looking streets and skylines; we recognize a feeling of home in them, one that is made slightly uncanny by our distance.
In my mother’s closet are rows of old VHS tapes of family gatherings back in her mother country, Tunisia. They’re sites of remembrance and emotion, but they are suspended in time, and disconnected from the lives we live today and what we must plan for in the future. Seeing the characters in 1000xResist engage with the deeply nested legacies of those who came before them evokes the feeling I get when thinking about those tapes stored in that dusty old closet.
Just as Iris’ parents leave Hong Kong and everything they know, Iris chooses to leave her home, splitting away from her overbearing parents to join the government soldiers and scientists who will whisk her away to the undersea lab where she can be studied and eventually cloned. Eventually she runs again, willingly into the arms of the alien Occupants, who promise to empower her to stand apart from her parents, but they will take something away as well. She will live on, but within an eternity of unprocessed trauma, in a kind of suspended animation — not growing, not moving forward, but looking back, forever.
We all wind up repeating at least some of our parents’ mistakes. It’s an inevitability. We grow in much the same ways, with many of the same patterns baked in, and yet we think that, this time around, we’ll do things differently. Like Iris’ father tells her: “We do not get to choose what we inherit.”
We see this manifested 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 herself away, removing herself from the hard task of parenting, just as her dreamer of a father often did, leaving the task of disciplining to others.
There’s an extent to which the memories and behaviors we inherit, especially when 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 being drawn back endlessly.
The game teaches us that to truly grow, to become something separate and new, we have to leave our memories in the past. Iris, held in the timeless embrace of the Occupants, cannot move on from her past, cannot step outside of her dreams. She is haunted by unprocessed memories, and so are her clones. She spreads the haunting like an infection. The memories become vestigial, cancerous, growing and multiplying, weighing down their hosts.
The Occupants aren’t acting out of any sense of hostility. They inadvertently destroy the humans by separating them from their memories, which continue on in deathless stasis. But memory, like mortal life, is supposed to fade away. It is made richer because it’s something we have to actively grasp at, like the ephemeral threads of a dream slipping from our minds as we leave our beds. Life is precious because it is momentary and fleeting.
At the end of 1000xResist, Secretary, a split-off element of the original Occupant, joins back with its original host after 1,000 years with the clones. Over that millennium, Secretary learns many things from humanity, chief among them the temporary nature of life and the inevitability of death. It comes to understand that this fading and flawed eternity that Iris and her clones have been trapped in has long since drifted past its expiration date, and must come to a merciful end.
The choice is made to risk venturing out onto the unknown surface, rather than remaining with the ghosts buried below. These remaining clones, free from Iris’ all-eclipsing memories, must learn how to leave the past behind, while continuing to cherish and learn from it. Children must learn how to make their own memories, while bringing the hard lessons learned by their parents with them.
1000xResist locates the kernel of hope within a future full of compromise and failures. It shows us how protest movements may 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 some eternal, unreal past, is no way to live. We must accept the past as gone, while understanding that we will always bring a part of it with us as we walk forward into the uncertain future.
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