A draft. I might revisit it later, but for now: a video game review.
I would not have anticipated that 1000xResist would be totally impossible to play twice because now that I mostly understand what’s going on from the beginning I can’t bring myself to walk through it again. For some reason I’ve raved about it elsewhere but never here? An embarrassing oversight.
Anyway: I sort of want to talk about video games and art. I know the “are video games art” conversation is long stale at this point, but I don’t really have a better entrypoint to what I really want to talk about, which is “how good is 1000xResist“.
If you’re as oldaf as I am you might remember when Roger Ebert’s opinions about video games kicked off an extremely one-sided internet argument – I don’t think Ebert cared, to be honest – that has simmered on and off in various, occasionally-unsavory corners of the internet ever since.
Obvious answers obviously abound obviously, and because the obvious people obviously hold them strongly I think Doc Seuss has something of a point: that plenty of the people insisting that Games Are Art aren’t in it to advance the critical discourse or elevate the human condition, but to get themselves some of that sweet respectability and tastefulness-cred that comes from the imprimatur of Things Being Real Art.
[…] it’s “are games art?” because they want to ask, but do not know how to formulate the question of “when will games be perceived as some form of high art, rather than pop art? When will they, and the people who buy them, get respect?”
I think the main reason I’m sympathetic to this argument is its gamergate-adjacency – you remember that mysogynist larval-fash ethics-in-game-journalism crowd – and my long-held positions that (1) the right terms for drooling over anime ass aren’t “enlightened” or “ennoblement” and (2) that gamergaters can eat shit in a ditch. But his conclusion is:
The answer to “are games art?” is :”art is anything produced for the primary purpose of aesthetic or emotional fulfillment, as opposed to a tool, which is created for the purpose of achieving an explicit material goal. Some games are art and other games are more like tools — like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, which exists to teach you how to type, as opposed to nourishing your soul. Both are equally important.”
… and I don’t think that’s true, or at least complete; a false dichotomy for sure, but also cutting an important discussion short.
Way back Tycho at Penny Arcade once said, about the undisciplined camera and awkward controls of Shadow Of The Colossus, that “the game needs to be seen by every conscious organism on planet Earth. And if that means that you must play it in order to do so, that is your cross to bear.
There’s a deep insight there, that understanding a video game means not just interrogating it as a text, but also as a travelogue, and also as a sport. That really seeing a game, much less critiquing one, means understanding how and why all those things are sewn together, picking at the stitching and seams.
But I’m also reminded of Eliza Gauger’s now-I-think-hidden-so-I’m-paraphrasing retort: “The question is not ‘are videogames art’. Of course they are, how could they be anything else? The question we should be asking is: why are so many games so bad?”
I think part of the answer to that (entirely correct) observation is that we (We? I, for sure…) lack a language, much less a practice, of criticism that speaks to those failures or illuminates any other possible paths forward for creators.
If you’ve been reading this blog long enough you’ve seen this play before; “we’re missing a language for this”, one of my all time favorite rhetorical angles. Completely irrefutable, but also I get to make up words? All while listening to the sound of my own voice? It’s the best; I’m kissing my fingers like a chef here just thinking about it.
But in this case at least, we have a lot of the parts of that missing language lying around! We describe athletes, from team sports or gymnastics right through to full-contact or combatives, as “performing beautifully” all the time. We can talk about the architecture of the Grand Louvre all day, and about any of the works with in it at least as long. The critical histories of art and architecture go back centuries, even if museums purpose-built to house the works of a particular artist are in some sense disconnected from the art itself.
But of course, obviously obviously, you don’t traverse the Louvre appreciating progressively more impressive works until you finally enter a large room where you appreciate the biggest or most challenging work. Nobody insists that you defeat the Portrait Of Louis XIV before you can get in line for the Mona Lisa, or that once you’ve manage to appreciate Leonardo’s work you win, you’ve defeated the Louvre. Two more major museums and you’ll have enough appreciation for the Grand Palais, and you can elaborate a full criticism of that, you win at Paris!
Right now with Louvre renovations underway and the Mona Lisa literally in another castle, we’ll set that aside for the moment.
This is where my reasoning either all comes together or all falls apart, depending: 1000xResist is an astonishing game. Just end to end incredible.
And – to a cursory glance – it’s nothing. Superficially it’s barely a game.
Character designs? Pretty simple, basic colors and shapes. Level design? Mostly straightforward stuff, big rectangular rooms and long hallways. Motion, exploration? Aside from your main character – using the combined powers of “walk” and “jog” – almost nothing in the game so much as moves. To modern near-photorealistic-fidelity standards, this game barely exists. In terms of gameplay and interaction, it’s “find things with words in them” and a periodic”check if you learned the words.”
If you were feeling extremely superficial, under-languaged and kind of mean-spirited – all symptoms of the Games-Are-Art-Insister-Gater crowd, I said what I said, if you’re experiencing any of these symptoms consult a doctor or at least a book – 1000xResist is a lo-fi walking simulator interrupted by the occasional semi-sensical dialog tree, and no single piece of the game parted off and standing alone would convince you otherwise.
But.
The story, the overarching narrative and the writing that ties it all together, is impossibly good. So good that you can barely see anything else, so good that it is impossible to replay knowing what’s coming, the kind of writing that carves itself into you.
And backstopped by that incredible writing, the Sunset Visitor team manages to squeeze every last drop of utility out of the resources they had. Every constraint, and this is me with my jaw on the floor every constraint, in this game and I suspect of the entire team – time, resources, experience, all of it – has been wrung out and distilled down into a unique, heavily stylized aesthetic with a renounced minimalism and precision execution that I cannot stop thinking about.
The winding, unexpected construction of the environments tell their own winding unexpected stories, as much as the narrative framework complements its own. The character designs inform and reflect the characters; spare, sparse spaces tell their own spare, sparse stories. Even the use of primary and second colors, their presence and absence, is in there chapter to chapter shouldering the narrative burden. Nothing detracts or distracts; it all hangs together and holds together and it never lets off the gas, all the way to the end.
In hindsight it feels like walking through a Haiku, not realizing what it was until you’re through.
1000xResist was the best game I played in 2024 and it wasn’t close. It is – maybe, kinda, in some small and petty sense – only barely a video game. And in every way that matters it is one of the best video games I’ve ever played.
Hekki allmo, sisters, hekki grace.