I Finally Found The Game I'm Not Going To Shut Up About This Year

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Stacey Henley

Published Sep 17, 2024

Followed

Every year, there is a small game that I end up obsessing over. There are always triple-A games I love each year, but part of the charm of these sorts of games I'm talking about are that a lot of people haven't heard of them. So you get to tell them about it. And then you get to check if they've played it. And then you get to ask why they haven't played it. And then you get to ask when are they going to play it. And then you get to ask them why they aren't playing it right now. And so on. But for 2024, I hadn't really found a game to cling to like that. Until I played 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:1000xResist.

1000xResist Is Your Favourite Game's Favourite Game

1000xresist watcher running with intention

Released in May, 1000xResist has slowly g🅰athered steam and momentum through word of mouth. It strikes a perfect balance as an indie game. Actually playing the game is relatively easy and streamlined, with some light platforming mixed in with conversations and the occasional fetch quest. But wrestling with the questions it poses is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:where the game becomes a beast.

With its PS2 graphics and Matrix-style setting,🦩 you play as the Watcher. It is her function to watch. Her sisters (exactly how they are related is part of the game’s twisting s🐲tory), are Knower, Healer, Fixer, and Bang Bang Fire. It should be easy to deduce the jobs of the first three, and then BBF is the military strategist. They are led by Principal, and serve the Allmother, also known as Iris, a teenage girl from the 2040s.

Watcher's function is to take the sisters through Iris' memories to learn more about their culture, and themselves. We see🗹 Iris as a spoiled, slightly mean teenage girl who makes friends with Jiao. Both are Chinese immigrants, but Iris is second generation and has an American accent and has largely abandone⛦d her culture, which upsets her parents - former freedom fighters who fled Hong Kong. Jiao has not lost her accent, or immersed herself with American culture, and the pair have a Bart and Milhouse-style dynamic.

Through alien invasion, mysterious disease, religion reinvention, political uprisings, and the interrogation of what it means to be reborn, what it means to serve a function, and what it means to know (and to ♛be) a god, 1000xResist takes us on a journey as complex and sprawling as it is linear and searingly focused. You are here♓ for the narrative more than the gameplay, but once it has its hooks in you, you will not be able to tear them away.

Every Year Has Special Unknown Gems

Healer in the city vision in 1000xResist

It gave me the same feeling as many other slightly less well known indie games I've gone to bat for in my time at TheGamer. Umurangi Generation and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Citizen Sleeper for its politics. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Slay the Princess and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Immortality for its non-linear storytelling. A Space for the Unbound🍸 for its exploration of foreign culture and metaphysical questions. The Artful Escape for its use of colour and surreal imagery. Umurangi Generation again for its retro graphics. I really like Umurangi Generation.

There are other games I've liked from 2024, obviously. 1000xResist joins 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Astro Bot, and Balatro as being na𓃲iled on picks for my Game of the Year list. But everyone knows Astro Bot, and Like a Dragon has mainstream status now too. Both are great, but there's not much use in telling people to play them - they've already heard they're good and have made up their minds.

Balatro is a littl𓆏e different. It has gotten some traction amongst the more hardcore gamers, but will have passed many by. It's an excellent roguelike that uses poker as its foundation, but lets you change the rules the more cards you play, and also blends tarot into the mix. And... that's it. It's great! But it's a card game. It's hard to say much more than it's really, really fun to play. And when you say that, people believe you or they don't. In my experience, a lot of people are put off by the card thing, and therefore choose ‘don't’. Maybe they just don't like me.

Keep 1000xResist In Mind For GOTY Season

Iris standing over the five sisters and Watcher in 1000xResist

Because everyone at TheGamer gets to pick a Game of the Year list individually, and then we add our choices up mathematically, I take the quest to get everyone to play each year's best games very seriously. I could, as Editor-in-Chief, take my ball and go home and install my own favourites as the annual kings, but I love the democratised way of choosing our list, the suspense it offers, the unique approach, and it has helped me discover other gems. It was because others were so insistent that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Paranormasight w💃o❀uld feature high up their lists that it ended up on mine. It's the whole reason I played 1000xResist at all.

In 2021 and 2022, our GOTY winners were 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Forgotten City and Citizen Sleeper - both games I also played via recommendations that ended up on my list, and while they weren't my top c𒁃hoice each year, I'm far prouder of those♋ two ending as TheGamer's top picks because they were a reflection of the site as a whole. With a larger team, the list becomes more diluted instead of curated, and so it is harder for spikier, more interesting, occasionally abrasive games to get through. But that only makes me bang the drum louder. 1000xResist is a must-play experience of 2024, and if you like any of the weird indie games I've mentioned here, you owe it to yourself to check it out. And if you've not heard of them, you must have been wearing ear plugs around me, because I haven't shut up about them since.