1000xResist is a confusing game with very little in the way of tutorials or trailers for you to learn how you're meant to play. This works to its advantage as a narrative experience but can make it confusing to engage with the game until you know what you're meant to be doing.
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PostsKnowing a few spoiler-free tips about how the game wants you to engage with it can help your experience and prevent you from missing content and having to replay chapters to get achievements or understand the story. Here's how to perform your duty as a Watcher and do the Allmother proud.
Audio Cues Tell You When There's Something Interesting
Items you can interact with or examine will have an orange glow to them. This makes it easy not to miss anything, except for the first communion, where everything is blanketed in red fog. Secretary, your robot assistant,will emit an audio note when you walk past something of interest and hover next to it. This can be easier than relying on only your eyes.
Secretary will also do this for NPCs you're able to speak to, but they're harder to lose track of when almost everyone is dressed in primary colors.
The First Communion Is The Most Confusing
The game is at its most overwhelming when you haven't been introduced to the mechanics yet. A lot of emphasis is placed on exploration, and you aren't given the tools you need for it right away. In your first communion, you'll be inundated with characters and conversations that are visible across barriers.
Once you follow the plot for a while, you start gaining different time periods to travel between. Now you can trivialize these obstacles by going to when they weren't there yet and swapping back.
Each Communion Is Different
Each communion follows different rules, not just mechanically but in how they tell their story. Some are first person, others have fixed perspectives, and yet others resemble cutscenes or novels more than video games.
This also means that characters and places will be seen from different angles and with different names. Some communions rely heavily on the dialect of Allmother and the sisters, while others are grounded in the word choices of the characters at that moment in time. Part of unraveling the story is finding links between the multiple languages.
Check Each Location In Multiple Times
The time-shifted versions of locations can give important hints at what initially appears confusing. You'll often be able to get the full version of a story by following a character, location, or object across time. Some scenes feel almost anthropological, as you see people in the future attributing new meanings to something they inherited from the past.
Later communions will throw dozens of time periods at you, but you rarely need to interact with more than two or three at a time.
Most Of The Storytelling Happens In The Background
The game gives you a very straightforward list of objectives to complete at any time, but focusing on them will miss you most of the worldbuilding and foreshadowing. Each chapter introduces and expands upon background characters that you can watch grow and change over time, especially among the Sisters.
A spoiler light example from the first communion is a heart engraved with "V+H." You can cross-reference this with the list of names in your class to find that Veevee and Hessian are the only two students with those initials. When you later encounter Veevee with an unknown boy, you can assume this is Hessian.
Take Notes Outside The Game
There are a lot of repeated names and subtle details you'll encounter while exploring. There is no in-game compendium, so you're expected to keep track of it yourself. Additionally, most conversations can't be repeated, and items can only be examined once or twice. Living up to the title of observer means you'll want to take notes.
This can also help you with navigating certain areas: There isn't an in game map, so if you don't have a good sense of direction, it becomes easy to spend long times circling about aimlessly.
This is especially important with names. Some characters have a dramatic impact on the story but only appear visibly once or twice and are largely expanded on through the dialogue of other characters.
Don't Worry About Locking Yourself Into An Ending
The game doesn't force you into an ending route early on or require you to replay the full game for all endings. You'll recognize the decisions that allow you to choose the endings, but most dialogue options ahead of this aren't worth worrying over.
The main content that can be missed in a playthrough are the dialogues and achievements for fully exploring each chapter. You can avoid this by noting your currently listed objective and doing everything else first.
The Orchard is much less worrying for completionists. You can check your waypoints to find all scenes and dialogues, and an achievement will pop once you've collected all of them for a chapter.
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