For this week’s Critical Play, I chose What Remains of Edith Finch. I was initially drawn to this walking sim out of the options given to me (by Ellie Vegas, who owned a number of games and shared them with our P1 group <3) because I was intrigued in the premise of a mystery, multiple points of view, and a game with a ‘real’ story that would be meaningful in some way. I’m very glad that I did play this game because it really surpassed all of my expectations. Finch was created by Ian Dallas and is available on Playstation, Switch, Xbox, and more. I played the Playstation version (I believe). It’s also important to note that I only played ⅓ of the game, and the other ⅔ I watched Emily Macias and Ellie’s partner play. I would say that the target audience of this game is fairly (or very) mature, with notes of suicide, mental illness (insanity?), murder, predation, starvation, and otherwise very unfortunate deaths. I would likely place it at 16+ for an age range.
Walking, or more accurately, walking, crawling, jumping, flying, swimming, and slithering tells the story of each of Edith’s family members by literally placing you into their shoes. In each vingette, the player enacts a new character in a predetermined scene of their life (or death). Because of the pre-determined storyline, I also argue that this is an embedded game. Through each vignette, you get a new piece of the puzzle in answering: “Who was the Finch family?” What Remains of Edith Finch is a fantastic game in which walking is the main mechanic that places the player into the role of, therefore enacting, each family member of the Finch family, and embeds the player into the elaborate story of the Finch family.
Enacting each character in the Finch family allows the player to empathize with the character, leading to a variety of aesthetics including: fear, ‘creeped out,’ distress, frustration, and sadness. As mentioned, enacting is one of the main dynamics of this game. Playing the character of each member of the Finch family gives you a valuable insight into how their life went. More importantly, it gives you details about how their life ended. The form of each vignette varies, from placing you into the camera lens as a scene goes on, to you being in the mind of the family member, watching as the fantasy encroaches onto the perception of reality. It is incredibly immersive and tailored to the experience and emotion of each character. I particularly enjoyed the vignettes of Molly and Lewis – Molly which transformed into several animals and the player had to adapt their navigational abilities to each animal (flying an owl, swimming a shark, climbing a cat); and Lewis which had a poignant image of his fantasy world slowly growing and obscuring the view of his reality. Enacting leads to a more powerful aesthetic experience.
The lack of instructional mechanics leads to a more immersive enacting and embedding experience. The decisions of the player are limited but feel vast. I think that this is one of the strongest aspects of Finch, as with many other games you ‘get the hang of it’ fairly quickly with provided instructions and hints as to how to or where to navigate. Finch provides none of this. There is no narrator that tells you how to move, there is no guide on how to interact with objects, you simply are thrown into world and left to figure it out. This is highly reliant on assumed knowledge from other games in reference to the joystick and which toggles are usually used for specific actions. Because of the age range and complexity of the game, I believe it is a fair assumption that the player will be familiar with these assumed controls. In my specific experience, Emily had to be told by Ellie what controls to use because she is not experienced in gaming. I, however, more easily picked up the controls through my assumed knowledge from first-person shooter games. Without the interruption of instructions, the player has a very continuous, smooth transition from story to story and it feels almost movie-like to complete the entire game in one sitting.
The embedded story of the Finch family evoked emotions of intrigue, curiosity, disgust, discomfort, fear, and sadness. Although it seems logical that an embedded story, therefore a story that has a pre-determined ending, would remove the aesthetic of fear from a game, this was not true in Finch. Contrastingly, I very much felt fear while playing the game. Specifically in the vignette of Barbara Finch, I had to put myself in the shoes of Barbara as she gripped a baseball bat in fear of a murderer hiding in her house. I constantly swung out the bat and turned around rapidly, hoping that the bat would come in contact with the attacker before the attacker would have a chance to harm me. This occurred despite the fact that I knew that this vignette was telling the story of how Barbara died. I knew that I, as Barbara, was destined to die, and yet I still felt fear and the will to ‘live.’ I even asked Ellie if it was possible to die in this game, in fear of making a wrong choice. (They answered no, but it seemed to provoke deeper thought into why the designers chose to not include a death mechanic.) This raises an important aspect of Finch, the ability to make choices, but the limited variety of choices that are available. More or less, the illusion of free choice. I think that the inclusion of ‘free choice,’ or more specifically the ability to wander the house, is very important to the feelings of discovery and fantasy in the game. Without it, in a linear format of Finch, the player likely would not feel the fun of discovering the hidden clues embedded into the house. And without the intense immersion provided by the simulation of the natural movement of walking (that allows you to feel like perhaps you really are walking through an existing house), the effect of fantasy would be much weaker on the player.
