There’s a question that’s been nagging me while playing Giant Sparrow’s What Remains of Edith Finch on Steam: if a game made for players who prefer story over challenge consists “only of walking”, what is it actually doing? After a couple of hours, I think I have an answer, and it’s more interesting than I expected. Walking in this game isn’t a stripped-down form of gameplay: it’s what carries nearly every piece of the story. The Finch family’s curse, the strange fates of each relative, the growing unease of the house itself, all of this reaches the player through their feet.
I will argue that walking tells the story in three interrelated ways: it is how the player investigates, how the player immerses themselves, and how the game maintains intrigue in what is, mechanically speaking, a rather linear experience. I will conclude with an ethical reflection on the deliberate exclusion of violence in the game and on a design flaw that nearly made me stop playing.
Walking as Investigation
The most striking aspect of walking is that it transforms the player into a detective. The narrative is deliberately left open-ended: the “curse” is never explained, the death of each family member is recounted in a different tone, and the game ends without resolving anything. The ambiguity seems intentional, almost as if the game wants the player to walk away with more questions than they had at the start.
Since interpretation is the central focus, walking becomes the verb used to achieve it. Every small discovery (for example a secret crack, a small unlockable objective, a narrative detail spotted in a cluttered bedroom) happens because the player has physically chosen to move there.
The narrative then overlays motivations and traditions onto that movement, transforming what might have been empty exploration into something that feels earned.
Walking as Immersion
Walking also serves to draw the player into Finch’s world, and it does so primarily through variety. In this game, there isn’t a single movement mechanic; there are many. Crawling down the basement stairs is different from wandering around the grounds outside the house. Short, animated scenes take over during specific transitions: crawling through a cat flap, climbing into a trapdoor, hopping among branches. Entire sequences abandon walking altogether: in one chapter, the player swims like an animal and flies like another.
This variety is evenly distributed throughout the game, which is why the movement never feels stale. The guidance is integrated into the environment rather than tacked on superficially: floating white dots, the arrangement of letters, small automatic camera movements, and lighting cues that subtly make it easier to spot the correct path. Interaction clues also play a major role. Stairs, open trapdoors, and illuminated doors draw the player toward them. I kept bumping into objects I couldn’t even interact with (locked doors, sealed chests) because the world felt consistent enough to be worth exploring.
Walking as an Element of Charm
What still surprises me is that this game managed to hold my attention for a couple of hours using, essentially, just one verb. Usually, exploration-based games leave me cold, so this shouldn’t have worked for me. A small early objective such as choosing one of two approaches to the house briefly raised my hopes for branching paths, but the structure is fundamentally linear. Trusting this linearity let me focus on the story.
Walking alone isn’t what kept me engaged. What engaged me was the way walking combines with small minigames, one for each family member, each with its own controls. One of these is a swing sequence where you use simple directional keys to swing back and forth: quick to learn, easy to execute with either the mouse or the keyboard.
The opening of each story (there is no resolution of the curse, no confirmation of what actually happened to whom) drives the player to press on in search of further clues. Walking becomes the rhythm by which the intrigue is revealed.
Ethics: Designing Around the Absence of Violence
The ethical choice I find most interesting is what the game leaves out. Every story in Edith Finch ends in death, yet violence as a mechanic is virtually absent. Compare this to the games I’ve played in the studio, where combat is the central loop: there, the design’s reward structure is built around executing violence well. Edith Finch turns all of this on its head. You can’t prevent any deaths, you can’t fight anything, you can’t intervene. You can only walk toward that moment and then go through it.
This design choice is what protects the game’s thesis. If any death were mechanically avoidable, the curse would become a puzzle, and the game would quietly shift into solving it rather than living with it. By removing violent mechanics, the developers eliminate the player’s instinct to optimize their way out of pain, and walking remains the only tool available. This exclusion is not timidity: it is the structural move that allows ambiguity to survive.
