Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!
Last week, I finished 1000xResist. It’s an incredible game, and having beaten it, I’m left with a dozen things to say. About its characters and writing style, its use of nonlinearity, its politics, its depiction of the Asian diaspora, its specific distrust of religion and institutions. This is a game that has a lot on its mind and is very good at getting that across. And that second one is most of the battle, right? I’ve experienced a lot of sci-fi stories that certainly were ambitious in their own ways but were fundamentally worse at being witty, thoughtful, and well-written. However, I keep coming back to one thing, and it’s actually kinda silly. Really, it shouldn’t take up this much of my attention. But it does, and it comes in two parts.
- 1000xResist is a narrative adventure game, a “walking simulator.” There are some fairly simple puzzles, and there is a time limit in one section that I found fairly easy to surpass, but this is not a game about capital-A “Action.” You walk around a compound. You talk to people. You get gently pushed onto the critical path. Like many games in this genre, the primary emotion is contemplative and languid. It’s a genre about immersing yourself in a space, in this case a cloistered, terrifyingly hierarchical community whose residents are both discouraged from and not trained to express complex feelings and ideas.
- 1000xResist has the aesthetics of a JRPG, particularly those of franchises like Xenoblade Chronicles and NieR. This is most obvious in the graphics, with their space age super suits and colony setting, but that also relates to its heady story. The time travel-based story falls in with a massive lineage of worldwide science fiction, and protagonist Watcher is really just one novelty sword away from looking like she could fit in the canon of role-playing game leads.
This is not exactly a “genre mash-up,” not in the conventional gaming sense. When we talk about melding genres in games, we rightfully start on seeing how the mechanics mash up. That’s the core of the thing. Instead, this is more of one kind of game using the look, feel, and attitude of another. And I think what I find most fascinating about this case* is that these are genres that don’t have a lot of obvious stylistic overlap. Sure, there are sci-fi walking sims like Tacoma, and sure, there are RPGs that are primarily interested in having you soak in a setting, but the connections aren’t inherently obvious.
* At least, beyond the fact that I started the game not knowing it was a walking sim at all, because I saw 1000xResist for sale on the Switch eShop, knew about its critical pedigree, and bought it basically sight unseen. Started the game, realized it was definitely not a JRPG, and said “alright! Let’s keep going.” I do that a lot more than a reasonable consumer should, but I think it works out for me.
Since finishing 1000xResist—really, since starting it—I’ve found this aspect of the game exciting. It’s not just that I like it, or that I think it’s a central part of what makes the game great; I want to see more games do this. I want games that give you one genre but with the look of another, games that challenge what we expect from them on a visual sense. So for today’s prompt, I’m asking you all about games that borrow the aesthetics of other genres. This is, I get, a somewhat unusual prompt, and it’s as speculative as it is interrogative. Please give me your ideas for how this could happen, and give me examples of games that did do this as well. And, if you have some time and own a PC, Switch, or PS5, consider playing 1000xResist. It’s good stuff.
While you’re mulling that over, what did you play this weekend?