Full video transcript below.
We’re four years into doing this VGG thing. We’ve got three Game of the Year winners behind us, and another waiting to be crowned. And somehow, each year of games has found new ways to wow us, to surprise us, to inspire us. Each year has only further solidified the idea that video games are good, and that they’re only this good because of the people who make them. That even through the constantly evolving and ever more formidable challenges that these artists face in making these games, we can come out the other end focused on celebrating the creatives that our world needs and working together toward a brighter and better future.
Despite how hard it was to nail down our list of nominees, it actually wasn’t all that hard to land on our eventual Game of the Year winner. It was a game that consumed our every moment from the minute we put it down, a game we dissected together and both thought about independently. A game whose songs we sang to ourselves all year. And as it turns out, we’d both been mentally writing a Game of the Year winning script for since credits rolled.
That isn’t to say we didn’t deliberate and that we don’t still stay up at night thinking about the nine other amazing nominees that wowed us, turning them over in our head to consider the ways in which they brought our lives joy and meaning in such a difficult year — but our ultimate winner is a truly special game that stands out as not only our best of 2024, but one of our all-time favorites too.
With our hearts full and minds ready for communion, let us introduce you to… our 2024… Game of the Year.
1000xRESIST, Sunset Visitor - 2024 Game of the Year
1000xRESIST is an enigma of a game. You’re dropped into its narrative during what looks to be its climax. You’re barraged with terms and phrases that are Shakespearean in how foreign they sound to new ears. Each story it tells is obscured and layered with meaning when considering who is telling it and why.
When we first started playing it, we were worried it would go over our heads. And some elements undoubtedly did throughout our first playthrough. But the slow unraveling and understanding of what this game is meant to communicate — of what feelings it wants to provoke in its players — stand out as some of the most satisfying things we’ve experienced in gaming in 2024.
1000xRESIST tells the story of the last remaining bastion of humanity left on the planet after a global pandemic brought on by an alien race wipes everyone out. It tells the story of a sisterhood finding their own way. Of a mother and a mother and a mother and an inability to break the cycles that have come to define them, despite their best efforts. It tells the story of a population resisting its oppressors, again and again. And it does it all from a bird’s eye view, examining our current culture and society from the perspective of an outsider, asking its characters to grapple with understanding and learning from the past in ways we often fail to.
It’s a work that is so emotionally engaging, so visually stunning, and so beautifully told. When we heard that many of Sunset Visitor’s team members came from the world of performing arts, it finally clicked why 1000xRESIST felt so fresh in the games space. Every piece of this work is intentionally placed, nothing wasted. Each line, each vocal quirk, each piece that this ensemble of artists brought to the table contributed to the whole in such a meaningful way, reminiscent of how performances we’d once been involved in would come together and morph to fit the mold crafted by the collective.
When you talk about a game like 1000xRESIST, it’s hard not to speak in the abstract. Because so many of its best pieces are hard to define, so many of its masterful turns are best experienced on your own, and because the abstract is where this game thrives. That isn’t to say there’s not some proper video game critic-y stuff we can say about this game.
For one, the vocal performances of its actors stand out as some of the best of the year. Ranging from young Secretary's academic certainty to BBF's dreamy lilt to Watcher's quiet and steadfast grit, this is a work full of beating hearts, and being fully voice acted benefited the story immensely.
Then there’s the graphical style and design choices, limited in scope by the team’s small size but just as effective as any triple-A game in execution. Sunset Visitor uses color to communicate so much about each character’s status and role in this unique society. They wring out as much story as they can out of the same environments, the same characters, because of the density of its storytelling and the constantly shifting context in which you approach these things.
What it all boils down to in the end is Sunset Visitor’s clear and powerful intent. One of the strongest answers we’ve ever gotten to the question of “what makes a video game good” came last year from Strange Scaffold’s studio head Xalavier Nelson Jr. He told us, “A video game is good if it shows focus in what it wants to communicate. Any game that has an intent and expresses it, even if it does it poorly, immediately ranks very high on my list of esteem, because I get to indirectly have a human connection with the person who made it. And I always learn something.“ And that’s exactly what playing 1000xRESIST feels like. For a handful of hours, this game put us into conversation with a collective of Vancouver-based creatives and our lives are all the better for it.
So, before we pop the champagne and crown this game, we want to thank Sunset Visitor. Thank you for sharing your vision with us, thank you for making this game, and thank you for being exactly the kinds of people we need in the games industry.
Hekki grace and congratulations to 1000xRESIST and Sunset Visitor for rising to the top in such an incredible year of games.
And there it is! Video Games are Good’s 2024 Game of the Year is done and dusted!
We’ve said it before, but 2024 was an incredible year for Video Games are Good and we’re so thankful to all who have made that a reality for us. We started this because we wanted to bring some light and love to an industry that had become so defined by negativity and hate. When you’ve got games like 1000xRESIST to fawn over, the love comes easy.
We hope you take the time to check the game out, and all the games on our nominee list, because all of these games truly inspired us to be better people and to continue seeking out incredible pieces of art to share with you all.
If you want to see more 1000xRESIST, stay tuned as VGG will be streaming a full playthrough to start the year in January. If you wanna keep up with our writing, visit videogamesgood.com. And if you just wanna talk games, join our Discord community!
Thank you for watching and we’ll see you next year.
Take a look at our other recent Game of the Year winners, Alan Wake 2 (2023), Immortality (2022), and Chicory: A Colorful Tale (2021).
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