1000xResist developer added a video sequence ‘out of desperation’ but now they’re bringing FMV back for their next game

You’ve been playing 1000xResist for half a dozen chapters, enjoying changes in perspective and mechanics with each chapter shift. Yet the sudden jump to video still feels unusual when it happens—recorded footage of Hong Kong suddenly taking the place of a cutscene in the middle of the game. As creative director Remy Siu says, that decision came about “really out of desperation.”

Sunset Visitor, the studio behind 1000xResist, was founded by performers with backgrounds in the arts. Siu just happened to have some footage for a documentary product that turned out to perfectly fill a gap in his game project. “It’s like, oh, let me reach into my archives and see what I have.”

When the studio began thinking about the follow-up project that would eventually become Prove You’re Human, a game about convincing an AI she’s not a real person, they identified FMV as a useful thing to be proficient in. “Like, we feel comfortable doing lots of voiceover, because that’s where we think we can make an interesting contribution,” Sui says. “We’re making very narrative-forward games, largely because we think that’s where we can make a special contribution. And these full-motion videos and film things, that’s something I think we can continue to explore.”

In Prove You’re Human, players embody a digital copy who has been downloaded into a virtual world to interact with an artificial intelligence—meanwhile, the original person is out there living her best life thanks to the payout she was given for consenting to be copied. That half of the game is depicted in video.

FMV may have a bad name in some circles, but there are plenty of indie studios looking past the reputation it was given by games like Mad Dog McCree (which we gave a score of 4% in our review back in the day). Games from Her Story to the flood of Asian dating sims on Steam show there’s room for all kinds of videogame storytelling that involves putting actors in front of cameras.

“There’s a lot of exciting movement in that direction right now,” says Tony Howard-Arias of Black Tabby Games, who are publishing Prove You’re Human. “I mean, Immortality was a handful of years ago. I really enjoyed Road to Empress last year, which was a Chinese choice-driven FMV game that was exploring a historical empress in a very dramatized fashion.”

“It was so high-budget,” adds his partner Abby Howard. “The locations were crazy.”

Though FMV has risen from the grave, it’s still not that common, even in the narrative games space. “It’s something that as a genre, I do think we get to jump in there and put our own little stamp on it,” Siu says. “And it made a lot of sense for the kind of science fiction scenario that we’re in in this game, where there’s a very clear split between the physical world and the virtual world.”

Prove You’re Human will be available on Steam.