A small Vancouver video game studio just won a Peabody Award

First-time successes are always a joy to behold. And in the rollercoaster world of video game development, 1000xResist, the debut title from Vancouver-based indie studio Sunset Visitor, is a prime example. 

Paste Magazine calls the game "a dazzling testament to the stories this medium has yet to tell" and "an exemplification of the best that small yet ambitious teams can create."

1000xResist has been out for just over a year. In that time, it has accrued a Steam rating of 97 per cent — an outstanding score in the review measurement that works something like Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer. It has also been recognized with numerous award nominations including Nebula and Hugo awards. And last month, it became just the fourth game to take home a Peabody Award, the oldest major honour for electronic and broadcast media in the U.S., since the Immersive and Interactive category was introduced in 2022.

The game's story focuses on a society of clones that worships their original source clone, referred to as "Allmother." Players take the role of Watcher, one of the principal clones, traversing a future world infected by a fatal disease brought to Earth by aliens known as the Occupants. Watcher uncovers key elements of the story as she goes, so there's a strong connection between the player's actions and those of the protagonist, who unravel the mysteries together. There are elements of exploration games, like Mobius Digital's Outer Wilds. But 1000xResist is undeniably a narrative game, which is to say that its story is the most important element. 

CBC Arts spoke with Sunset Visitor's founder and creative director, Remy Siu, about Canadian games and the increasing presence of narrative titles in the industry.

"Canada has so many indie game studios and developers, and in my opinion it's one of our cultural exports," says Siu. "In terms of the nature of indie games and how they can pierce through and become a part of the discussion, I think that there's an outsized Canadian presence in that."

He mentions exemplary, award-winning titles like Venba by Toronto's Visai Games, Inscryption by Daniel Mullins and Celeste by Maddy Makes Games (both based in Vancouver) as well as Montreal developer KO_OP's rhythm-oriented visual novel, Goodbye Volcano High.

With the precarious state of the video game industry — where reduced funding and a post-pandemic dip in sales have resulted in mass layoffs, especially for the companies producing blockbuster games — Siu reflected on the future of indie and narrative-focused projects.

"There is a space for narrative games to flourish," he says, especially with developers from larger studios departing to work for indies or starting out for themselves. "Often in an indie context, people get to work on things they really want to work on."

Narrative games are sometimes maligned as niche and risky. But nobody leaves a film complaining there was too much story, says Siu. So why do narrative games carry that stigma?  He points out that trend analyses actually indicate an upswing in narrative games receiving more than 1,000 reviews on Steam — a common metric for success in games.

In an interview with GoNintendo from June 2024, Siu highlighted another concern: that narrative games can lack gameplay. He even said it could be a criticism of 1000xResist. The game is a descendent of 90s point-and-click adventures like The Dig and The Secret of Monkey Island, he says, but also more recent examples such as Kentucky Route Zero.

One of the biggest challenges Siu's team encountered was determining how quickly to dole out information to players — too much and it's overwhelming, too little and it's boring. Reflecting on their writing process, Pinki Li, one of the game's two narrative designers, says : "The intricacies of the timelines, the layers of plot and the characters were definitely of a scope and scale I have never experienced in my career."

The team's approach to dialogue was simple and clean. It should tell the player something about the world, something about the character and it should sound interesting, says Siu. That may seem easy, but crafting 15,000 lines of dialogue, each abiding by those core rules, is a tough task.

"As a writer, my tendencies are toward poetry," Li says. "I love 'less is more,' and really appreciate being succinct and economical with language. Trying to convey a lot in a few words is a challenge I am very nerdy about."

Additionally, Sunset Visitor focused on bringing the lived experiences of the Asian diaspora to a speculative fiction universe, something Siu says is not often done. "We don't see … the level of specificity we would desire, so that was one of our missions with the game — to be able to couple the telling of [these] experiences with experimental explorations of camera, storytelling and gameplay."

Given the quality of the storytelling, the artistic style in which it is delivered and the ease with which players are immersed in the game's world, it is no wonder that Sunset Visitor has been honoured with a Peabody Award. Created in 1940 to honour exceptional storytelling in radio broadcasting, the award now recognizes storytelling achievement in television, journalism, podcasts, interactive media and more. Honourees must have wide appeal and truly excel in order to earn the requisite unanimous vote from the 16 judges.

Siu attended the award ceremony on June 1 in Los Angeles. He was proud to be there, supporting his team's game and vision, he says, but the thing that made him happiest was representing Vancouver's experimental arts scene on such a significant stage.

"There's so much more that indie games can achieve in how they approach narrative and art form," Siu says. "I think the strength of indie games in general is that we don't know how to make them, it's a beginner's thing, and we're all experimenting and trying something new. The desire is to keep pushing, but not to lose that as we go."