Demo freely offered up for 1000xRESIST

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Postapocalyptic, time-travelling sci-fi adventure coming to PC and Switch in early 2024

How could a world rebuild from a deadly disease that leaves just a single survivor? And if it could, what kind of world would that be? We'll soon get one possible interpretation of just such an apocalypse in the upcoming time-travelling sci-fi adventure 1000xRESIST, and it probably won't be anything like you'd expect.

When aliens known as "The Occupants" arrived on Earth, they were seemingly benign but brought with them a plague that killed everyone on the planet except one teenaged girl named Iris. As it turns out, Iris is not only immune but actually immortal, and over the course of the next millennium she establishes a "new society consisting exclusively of her own clones" who worship her as the "ALLMOTHER." However, these "sisters" must remain hidden as they don't share the same immunity as their creator, forced to "wear masks 24/7 to avoid breathing the diseased air even in the Orchard – an underground bunker where they live in constant fear of an Occupant attack."

Each member of this society serves a single assigned purpose, with six singled out for particularly special roles. You are one of those six, the new Watcher, who has "the great privilege of reliving and interpreting the memories of the ALLMOTHER through a process known as Communion." You're fully committed to your role, until a shocking revelation from your closest sister that the ALLMOTHER has been lying to you all and "is not what she claims to be." Now, along with your floating AI companion known as Secretary, you must travel back in time and "resist a thousand-year-old lie in this thrilling tale of aliens, clones and betrayal."

1000xRESIST is a third-person 3D adventure, the camera trailing over your shoulder as you control the protagonist via keyboard/mouse or the recommended gamepad. Conceived by an "independent studio of majority Asian-Canadian diaspora creators with a decade of experience in dance, theatre, music, film, visual arts, and new media arts," the game is a similarly eclectic blend of exploration, conversation with more than 15,000 lines of fully voiced dialogue, puzzles to solve, and even a bit of teleportion-style platforming on occasion, which together project to fill about ten hours of gameplay.

As you insert yourself into "pivotal moments in [the ALLMOTHER's] life from high school days and the arrival of the Occupants to the creation of the Orchard and the birth of the first sisters," you must leap back and forth through moments in time in order to overcome obstacles and unlock new "areas and secrets" that would be otherwise inaccessible. In between Communions you are free to roam the Orchard, where you can get to know your fellow clones and uncover additional secrets. All the while, the story promises to throw "twists, turns and revelations at the player until they question everything they think they know."

The full version of 1000xRESIST isn't due out for Windows PC on Steam, GOG and Epic until the first quarter of 2024, along with a console version for Nintendo Switch, but a playable demo is available now on Steam, thrusting you into your first Communion set within Iris's high school shortly before the catastrophic outbreak, delving into the troubled relationship between Iris and another student named Jiao.

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