My first steps into the Shadow Realm are with bare feet and an empty head. After reaching out to Mohg's crusty egg, I materialise in a vast, rolling field dotted with ruins. In the distance is a dimmed, sickly twin of the Erdtree ringed by shadowy drapes. It takes a minute to remember my buttons, but I summon Torrent to sprint through the long grass like a dog being let off the leash, and almost immediately experience death from above – some gnarled freak just two-shot me into the dirt. It takes a while to get a rhythm going again, and sort out whatever I was trying to do with my NG+ build. I decide for the sake of efficiency to stick to my Moonveil/Carian Glintstone Staff setup, because one does not simply walk into a FromSoft DLC.

It takes more time to feel at home again, but soon I'm puncturing hearts and obliterating minds, executing small huddles of gibbering NPCs as they pray, finding ways to slip past hard-hitting knights. Everyone I meet is all about Miquella, and it's a lot, but such is the way of the cult. Miquella has left crosses scattered about the Shadow Realm for his devotees, to denote where he has shed parts of himself and his flesh; Jesus himself couldn't have pulled off this kind of postmodern brand campaign.

Eventually I find myself in the Specimen Storehouse, which is in many ways a classic convoluted FromSoft library/lab level, and perfectly in line with Elden Ring's weird fascination with eugenics and taxonomy. There are many artefacts here, including a preserved giant suspended face-down from the ceiling, a waistcloth draped over his rump. As soon as I see him, I am seized with wild Miquellan fervour and run behind him to write "hole ahead." I am the first to write this here; I am message-seeding for the most prominent hole in the game like an enterprising SEO writer. Later, as I'm about to get evaporated by a boss, my message gets a "like" that saves my life. We're so f***ing back.

Read more

Making sense of diaspora politics, regardless of culture and country involved, is a singularly painful dance with no fixed steps and no finale. It is a landscape littered with well-intentioned armchair warriors, white people, privileged expats, weird nationalists, and foetid trolls; everyone disagrees almost all of the time, with some blessed exceptions that bring people around the world together to ridicule a clown. Diaspora discourse might involve the fraying borders of a motherland or a monoculture, authenticity, racism, accents and code-switching, and dozens of other things that remain wholly untranslatable to an outside party. The psychology at play is a weird chimaera that can never be accurately captured in codified language of research and focus groups; the very idea of applying "accuracy" and objectivity to its study is a joke. It is also not the same repeated anecdote about white kids making fun of a stinky homemade lunch at school – friends, let's move past this as the core signifier of marginalised childhood. But it is always a mess, because the diaspora is chaotic by nature and necessity.

Sunset Visitor's speculative fiction adventure 1000xResist knows the fractal intensity of this mess well – so well that the game does an almost sociopathic job at mirroring the exhaustive cycles and repetition that define this world. At times it gets a little too solipsistic – understandable, given that the main premise is about clones facing the burden of existence – and at times I have to walk away because I'm just so damn tired. But it's also an extraordinary piece of work – one that places diasporic trauma front and centre in all its ugly glory.

This is a story that traces the echoes of Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution, which left a city-sized wound that hasn't yet closed or been allowed to scar with dignity. And as much as certain audiences might want to frame 1000xResist as a neat one-dimensional exploration of queerness, there is so, so much more to it than that. There is nothing especially unique about its structure or core concept – the difficult process of a character finding the man behind the curtain – and I certainly would not describe it as "the first game of its kind." What makes it so jarring and so open to these claims is the fact that it is simply not a game made for the white gaze, and I think that's beautiful.

Read more

Making sense of diaspora politics, regardless of culture and country involved, is a singularly painful dance with no fixed steps and no finale. It is a landscape littered with well-intentioned armchair warriors, white people, privileged expats, weird nationalists, and foetid trolls; everyone disagrees almost all of the time, with some blessed exceptions that bring people around the world together to ridicule a clown. Diaspora discourse might involve the fraying borders of a motherland or a monoculture, authenticity, racism, accents and code-switching, and dozens of other things that remain wholly untranslatable to an outside party. The psychology at play is a weird chimaera that can never be accurately captured in codified language of research and focus groups; the very idea of applying "accuracy" and objectivity to its study is a joke. It is also not the same repeated anecdote about white kids making fun of a stinky homemade lunch at school – friends, let's move past this as the core signifier of marginalised childhood. But it is always a mess, because the diaspora is chaotic by nature and necessity.

Sunset Visitor's speculative fiction adventure 1000xResist knows the fractal intensity of this mess well – so well that the game does an almost sociopathic job at mirroring the exhaustive cycles and repetition that define this world. At times it gets a little too solipsistic – understandable, given that the main premise is about clones facing the burden of existence – and at times I have to walk away because I'm just so damn tired. But it's also an extraordinary piece of work – one that places diasporic trauma front and centre in all its ugly glory.

This is a story that traces the echoes of Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution, which left a city-sized wound that hasn't yet closed or been allowed to scar with dignity. And as much as certain audiences might want to frame 1000xResist as a neat one-dimensional exploration of queerness, there is so, so much more to it than that. There is nothing especially unique about its structure or core concept – the difficult process of a character finding the man behind the curtain – and I certainly would not describe it as "the first game of its kind." What makes it so jarring and so open to these claims is the fact that it is simply not a game made for the white gaze, and I think that's beautiful.

Read more

Making sense of diaspora politics, regardless of culture and country involved, is a singularly painful dance with no fixed steps and no finale. It is a landscape littered with well-intentioned armchair warriors, white people, privileged expats, weird nationalists, and foetid trolls; everyone disagrees almost all of the time, with some blessed exceptions that bring people around the world together to ridicule a clown. Diaspora discourse might involve the fraying borders of a motherland or a monoculture, authenticity, racism, accents and code-switching, and dozens of other things that remain wholly untranslatable to an outside party. The psychology at play is a weird chimaera that can never be accurately captured in codified language of research and focus groups; the very idea of applying "accuracy" and objectivity to its study is a joke. It is also not the same repeated anecdote about white kids making fun of a stinky homemade lunch at school – friends, let's move past this as the core signifier of marginalised childhood. But it is always a mess, because the diaspora is chaotic by nature and necessity.

Sunset Visitor's speculative fiction adventure 1000xResist knows the fractal intensity of this mess well – so well that the game does an almost sociopathic job at mirroring the exhaustive cycles and repetition that define this world. At times it gets a little too solipsistic – understandable, given that the main premise is about clones facing the burden of existence – and at times I have to walk away because I'm just so damn tired. But it's also an extraordinary piece of work – one that places diasporic trauma front and centre in all its ugly glory.

This is a story that traces the echoes of Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution, which left a city-sized wound that hasn't yet closed or been allowed to scar with dignity. And as much as certain audiences might want to frame 1000xResist as a neat one-dimensional exploration of queerness, there is so, so much more to it than that. There is nothing especially unique about its structure or core concept – the difficult process of a character finding the man behind the curtain – and I certainly would not describe it as "the first game of its kind." What makes it so jarring and so open to these claims is the fact that it is simply not a game made for the white gaze, and I think that's beautiful.

Read more

In 1997, Diablo was everything to me; I thought about it at school, at family dinners, netball practice, recess. Even when I was allowed to play it on my dad's Gateway 2000, I wanted more. And the only place to get more Diablo, back then, was on the Diablo website. Yes, there were fan sites packed with cheats and the same gifs - but what I wanted was a pure unadulterated hit from the official webpage, its message boards filled with poetry and oddly civil flame wars and passive-aggressive posts titled "SUGGESTIONS for Blizzard to Read." There was no YouTube or Discord or Twitch, and certainly no influencer/streaming ecosystem. Sure, there was IRC and usenet and bulletin boards, which formed the backbone of social networks back then - and were the foundation for more accessible World Wide Web experiences that followed. But in the late 90s, there was something truly special going on for fans who wanted a direct connection to their games: the short-lived but holy institution of the official forum-based website.

Around the same time as my Diablo mania, a teenaged Dana Nightingale was asked to do her first professional web design job. She'd been a fan of Looking Glass Studios since Ultima Underworld came out in 1992; when she heard rumours of System Shock 2, a new shooter by ex-Looking Glass devs under the banner of Irrational Games, she and a friend made a fan site in anticipation of its existence. Nightingale was also waiting for Looking Glass to unveil Thief: The Dark Project. "[Thief] at the time was my most anticipated game by a long shot, and if you look at the landscape of 1998, that's saying a lot," she says. "So together with some other folks, we made a hub for fans of these games, and we called it Through the Looking Glass."

Irrational got in touch with Nightingale to make their sites. "I definitely wasn't even 20 at the time. I barely knew what I was doing," she says on a Zoom call. "I threw some HTML on there, took the copy they sent me - didn't know back then that it was called copy - and put it all together." For System Shock 2, the only visual she was given was a picture of Shodan's face. "I [had] to make everything based on just one image, that's all I had," she laughs, pointing to the website's splash page while sharing her screen. Today, Nightingale is level design director at Arkane Lyon, where she's worked for the past 13 years; a week before our chat, she'd unearthed the original Irrational website files by accident on an old hard drive. "I don't even remember how much [Irrational] paid me," she grins, "but it probably wasn't very much."

Read more

In 1997, Diablo was everything to me; I thought about it at school, at family dinners, netball practice, recess. Even when I was allowed to play it on my dad's Gateway 2000, I wanted more. And the only place to get more Diablo, back then, was on the Diablo website. Yes, there were fan sites packed with cheats and the same gifs - but what I wanted was a pure unadulterated hit from the official webpage, its message boards filled with poetry and oddly civil flame wars and passive-aggressive posts titled "SUGGESTIONS for Blizzard to Read." There was no YouTube or Discord or Twitch, and certainly no influencer/streaming ecosystem. Sure, there was IRC and usenet and bulletin boards, which formed the backbone of social networks back then - and were the foundation for more accessible World Wide Web experiences that followed. But in the late 90s, there was something truly special going on for fans who wanted a direct connection to their games: the short-lived but holy institution of the official forum-based website.

Around the same time as my Diablo mania, a teenaged Dana Nightingale was asked to do her first professional web design job. She'd been a fan of Looking Glass Studios since Ultima Underworld came out in 1992; when she heard rumours of System Shock 2, a new shooter by ex-Looking Glass devs under the banner of Irrational Games, she and a friend made a fan site in anticipation of its existence. Nightingale was also waiting for Looking Glass to unveil Thief: The Dark Project. "[Thief] at the time was my most anticipated game by a long shot, and if you look at the landscape of 1998, that's saying a lot," she says. "So together with some other folks, we made a hub for fans of these games, and we called it Through the Looking Glass."

Irrational got in touch with Nightingale to make their sites. "I definitely wasn't even 20 at the time. I barely knew what I was doing," she says on a Zoom call. "I threw some HTML on there, took the copy they sent me - didn't know back then that it was called copy - and put it all together." For System Shock 2, the only visual she was given was a picture of Shodan's face. "I [had] to make everything based on just one image, that's all I had," she laughs, pointing to the website's splash page while sharing her screen. Today, Nightingale is level design director at Arkane Lyon, where she's worked for the past 13 years; a week before our chat, she'd unearthed the original Irrational website files by accident on an old hard drive. "I don't even remember how much [Irrational] paid me," she grins, "but it probably wasn't very much."

Read more