I’ll never forget playing Nier: Automata for the first time.

It was just a few weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, amid a lot of fear and uncertainty about the state of the world, which made developer Platinum Games’ vision of a post-apocalyptic landscape particularly hard-hitting. I found myself enraptured by this trio of androids’ desperate quest to find hope and meaning in a world seemingly bereft of all that. But even removed from the pandemic context, anyone who’s played Nier: Automata will tell you how its riveting post-modernist tale about existentialism ranks among the finest stories ever told in gaming. Truly, it leaves an impact like few other games.

1000xResist, a 2024 narrative adventure game from Vancouver-based Sunset Visitor, hit me as hard — and, in some cases, even harder — than Nier: Automata. The story, which follows a group of clones carrying on in a world ravaged by an alien pandemic, mixes some of the somber vibes, stunning stylistic flourishes and ruminations on the human condition of Nier with a moving exploration of intergenerational trauma and the lived experiences of Asian immigrants. Despite having played literal dozens of games in the past couple of months for work, including 1000xResist, it’s Sunset Visitor’s work that I find myself constantly thinking about, and I’m not alone in that, given the strong critical reception.

That sort of acclaim and sticking power would be an achievement for any game, but what makes it all even more impressive is when you consider that this is Sunset Visitor’s first game. Indeed, where Nier: Automata benefited from some 20 years of development experience from auteur writer-director Yoko Taro, 1000xResist is a pivot into gaming from a quartet of performance artists, plus a few contractors, who found their industry shut down during COVID. It’s all truly fascinating, and I was eager to learn more about it, leading me to reach out to chat with creative director and co-writer Remy Siu.

Right off the bat, I was surprised to hear him talk about how one of his driving influences behind the game, at least from a general narrative and tonal perspective, was actually Final Fantasy VII. Ahead of 1000xResist‘s launch in May, Siu posted on social media that “I was making what FF7 made me feel when it hurt me as a kid.” Despite VII being my all-time favourite game, I didn’t initially make that connection until he elaborated on it during our interview.

1000xRESIST comes out on May 9th.

I’ve been told that we accidentally made MULTIPLE GAMES:

a survival horror
a time puzzler
a walking simulator
a visual novel
a side-scroller

When in my heart, I was making what FF7 made me feel when it hurt me as a kid. https://t.co/hdBez8Vaqg

— remy siu | 1000xRESIST (@RemySiu) April 16, 2024

“I grew up in the Vancouver suburbs, and so the culture shock of Midgar [FFVII‘s dystopian, megacorporation-controlled main city] for me was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never seen anything like this!’” he explains of his reaction to the game after renting the iconic RPG from Rogers Video solely based on the box art.

“That’s kind of what I wanted to capture — my experience of playing that and everything being kind of mysterious with this sense of general bleakness,” he explains. “You’re wandering through detritus of things a lot of the time […] It’s quite sad and melancholic and wistful, and the spirit of all of that stuff is what I wanted to try and capture.”

Indeed, 1000xResist, not unlike Nier or FFVII, has a palpably solemn atmosphere, with the player character, a clone named ‘Watcher’ (wonderfully performed by Vietnamese-Canadian Nhi Do), having to learn what led to societal collapse. But what gives 1000xResist a deeper level of humanity than most other games is that the story is so rooted in the Asian diaspora. I’m afraid to say much about the story so as to preserve its many incredible surprises, but without spoiling anything, Watcher’s investigation focuses heavily on Iris and Jiao, two struggling Asian-Canadian teens who are, in many ways, the beating heart of 1000xResist. On Watcher’s quest, you’ll learn how everything from the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests and the COVID-adjacent alien pandemic to the specific struggles encountered by immigrants, both young and old, impact that core relationship and, by extension, many others. It makes for one of the most profound and affecting game narratives I’ve ever experienced.

At the same time, it’s easy to imagine a version of 1000xResist with a far more reined-in scope. After all, it could have just been either a high-concept sci-fi story spanning a millennium or a more intimate and grounded A24-esque immigrant drama. Certainly, it would have been understandable for a first-time game maker to opt for one over the other. And yet, 1000xResist works brilliantly as both. According to Siu, a key reason for that stems from the fact that immigrant stories and science fiction “fit together quite nicely” in media.

“Because largely for for immigrants, they’re thinking about a future yet that doesn’t exist. They often move and they come to a place like Canada, largely for some degree of future that doesn’t yet exist. And so they’re always projecting outwards into the future. And then, also, as diasporic persons in Canada, no matter which culture you’re from — you’re not looking into the past of Canada as your own past. So as diaspora, especially in Canada, we’re very unmoored in a sense,” he explains.

“We wanted to be able to use science fiction to examine degrees of diaspora and immigrant life, but I think that provides a degree of distancing effect, and I think that’s how we also did in performing arts. And that’s what science fiction always does — it provides a degree of distance, or sometimes, even, a kind of a Brechtian effect [a didactic play that encourages the audience to directly engage with the production instead of merely passively observing it], where you can look at something mundane and every day, which is maybe the immigrant experience, but then highlight it from a very different lens.”

In 1000xResist, Sunset Visitor masterfully evokes this sense of detachment through clever gameplay and aesthetic elements. Often, time jumps will be marked with changes in perspective (like side-scrolling through seemingly unending corridors) and scope (i.e. eerie, almost demonic aliens that tower over you), with vivid In the Mood for Love-inspired cinematography that emphasizes striking and atmospheric colour palettes. It’s easily some of the strongest art direction I’ve ever seen in a game.

Naturally, though, such artistic displays presented quite a few challenges. In particular, Siu’s small team had to keep track of the many timelines, both from a narrative and technical perspective. People often underestimate how difficult game development can be, with any number of bugs or other variable issues presenting themselves depending on each player’s unique inputs. So, what might happen when you’re dealing with multiple timelines between which the player can instantaneously jump?

“Let’s say the high school [an early horror-tinged level in which the Watcher learns more about Iris and Jiao] — there’s those two distinct time periods in the editor that are just overlapping on top of each other. And so we had to make a tool to filter out that to preview each timeline,” Siu explains. “But then it just becomes a logistics nightmare sometimes, where you’re like, ‘Oh, this one locker is in the wrong timeline, or this thing is in the wrong timeline, we’re going to move it.’” He says this became especially challenging in some sections, like one in Iris’ apartment where you would be switching between around 40 timelines.

This is where the team’s theatre background is most apparent. As Siu explains, he and some other members of the team have their own interdisciplinary performing arts group, Hong Kong Exile, which has produced over a dozen original works with a focus on immigrant diasporic stories. However, Siu also notes that the limitations of the stage meant that a video game like 1000xResist allowed for a richer exploration of this subject matter — the idea of making changes to single settings to tell a larger story. “In theatre, you have these people who come on in all-black wear, hidden and just moving stuff — that’s kind of what it felt like,” he says with a laugh.

But despite the sprawling sci-fi story and universality of the immigrant themes, Siu says the team did still want to include a few Canadian-specific flourishes. For one, a couple of lines of dialogue confirm that the flashbacks to Iris and Jiao’s teenage years are set in B.C., although the game never makes a big deal out of this. “We’re always very trying to express a degree of Vancouver-ness in what we do,” he says.

A more specific example of that, he notes, is with Iris’ apartment.

“We tried to make it as realistically ‘Canadian apartment’ as possible. It’s not a lot of room, right? Because you see in so many [games] — even the home in Gone Home is kind of huge. And that’s out of necessity, a little bit, for gameplay,” he says, noting how many games often require a sufficiently large setting in which the player can explore and discover new narrative tidbits.

Instead, he says the team looked at blueprints for both larger and smaller apartments in Vancouver for inspiration before ultimately opting for the latter. “Because the big one, if we were to walk into that apartment in Vancouver or in Toronto, [we] would be like, ‘This person probably is doing pretty well. And that’s not 100 percent what we wanted.’”

Ultimately, though, those restrictions “did force us to make a lot of interesting gameplay decisions and design decisions around that,” he explains. Chief among those is how Sunset Visitor instead chose to hone in on all of the different perspectives in which you’d view the home — sometimes quite intimately through Iris’ own eyes, other times in a more detached, top-down POV — to deepen the player’s relationship to the setting and make it a fleshed out character unto itself.

On the whole, Siu notes that Vancouver had a significant underlying influence on the design of the game.

“It’s also paired with the fact that we have a lot of experimental performing arts here in Vancouver, say, versus outside of other major Anglo cities in Canada. So I think all of that is the reason why the game exists as it does, very specifically,” he explains. “And I say this always: I try to capture as much locality as possible in things that I’m making. How can we make it look and feel as like Vancouver culturally as we can? And that came both from content and even aesthetics wise. There’s a lot of brutalism in Vancouver as well.”

Something else that Vancouver has is a thriving indie game community, and it’s something Siu has only recently been able to truly appreciate now that he’s a part of it. As he explains, “the performing arts and the visual arts and the indie game scene don’t overlap at all,” and so he’s had a great experience meeting the local developers.

“There’s actually a lot of real indie heavy hitters based in Vancouver, and there’s a whole community around that, and they’re all very good at activating and doing community work and supporting other developers,” he says. He specifically shouts the nascent Vancouver Game Garden (organized by Vancouver-based Chicory: A Colorful Tale developer Wishes Unlimited) and Full Indie (Vancouver’s biggest indie non-profit, which has featured the likes of Darkest Dungeon studio Red Hook, Cadence of Hyrule maker Brace Yourself Games and Sunset Visitor itself). In total, he says there are at least four community-driven events a month.

“I’m just starting to discover so many people that actually live in Vancouver. I tell this to them, ‘This is very surreal to me.’ Because as artists, we often move away from Vancouver. You decide to leave. But here are game developers wanting to get in and flocking into develop into Vancouver,” he says. “The indie community in Vancouver is really buzzing right now. And they’re all very supportive and very approachable, and it’s been amazing to meet everybody. I’m really kind of shocked and awed how much work they put in for the community building part and so it makes me want to help out.”

Of course, one major way in which he’s already helped out is simply by making a beloved video game that further showcases Vancouver creators. For many, like me, we can simply come away being moved by his art. But on a deeper level, those from the Asian diaspora — many of which are located in B.C. — may even be inspired by what Sunset Visitor has accomplished and want to make games of their own.

“I think that it’s not an accident that some of the last major diasporic games that came out were from Canada,” he says, giving a shoutout to last year’s Venba, an acclaimed Indian cooking game from Toronto-based Visai Games.”I think Canada makes space for you to do that, especially if you’re applying for funding — those are stories that the funding bodies are interested in supporting. And they should be heard — they should be supported.”

For that reason, he encourages aspiring developers to hone in on those personal stories and be as authentic as possible when telling them.

“Diasporic communities are so vast and diverse in themselves. There is a flavour or affect or a very specific thing in each and every one of them that has not been manifested in video games, and that’s what I’m interested in seeing. If you do [make games], be honest. Let your audience know all those bits [of yourself], not just the good bits or the surface bits of what might be. Because we’re used to more surface things. Because often, when we don’t have the degree of creative freedom that we want to have in the work, it often gets reduced to the surface bits of a diaspora culture,” he explains.

“And you don’t want that; you want to bring all the bits, so that when somebody who may be from that same community plays it, they’re like, ‘Oh God.’ I think in terms of representation, at least people like me, that’s what I really am craving. But I’m looking for [that] in all media, and it doesn’t have to be my own culture […] I like to to try and discover other points of life and viewpoints of life and their experiences.”

This interview has been edited for language and clarity.

1000xResist is now available on Nintendo Switch and PC (Steam/EGS/GOG/Humble).

Image credit: Sunset Visitor/Fellow Traveller