Game: What Remains of Edith Finch
Creator: Giant Sparrow (Director: Ian Dallas)
Platform: Originally: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows; I played on iOS (Mac)
Target Audience: Though some sites list it as 10+, I would say this game is best intended for more mature audiences interested in narrative and storytelling.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a narrative walking simulator that was released in 2017. The gameplay took about 1.5-2 hours (to complete the story). Though I did not intend on playing an entire game for this critical play, the narrative hooked me and I found myself compelled to not only complete the story but to “walk through” more of the game’s atmosphere and writing. It is definitely a “one sitting” sort of game that leaves a mark on you long after the credits have rolled. I don’t consider myself a gamer, but the narrative strength of the game and the complimentary mechanics allowed me to feel fully immersed in the gameplay during my experience.
Though the walking simulator requires pretty basic mechanics (I played on my Mac so WASD controls to move and mouse click to interact with interactable objects), the game designers found ways to reinvent or enhance the mechanics through the storytelling. Most of the game is spent walking, but some is spent flying or swimming or beheading salmon or swinging or thumbing through pages. In these ways, the simple “walk and click” mechanics get reinvigorated and the gameplay becomes more dynamic. However, these elements aren’t just included to “change it up,” so to speak. Rather, the varying mechanics allow for more interaction with the narrative itself. When we inhabit the character Molly’s body, we get to swim like a shark as she imagines her 10-year-old self to be a shark. Or when we inhabit Calvin’s body, we can swing on the swing beside the house until we reach enough momentum to further the narrative. These shift in mechanics when we inhabit a new story allow for the game to remain fresh and exciting – not once did I ever grow tired of the gameplay. However, the game mechanics are perhaps not the most amenable to a laptop computer with a trackpad.
The dark atmosphere
In order to advance the narrative, the player must interact with objects around them via clicking. These objects are indicated with a little white circle, which stands out against the bleak, dark color scheme of the game’s environment. There are some object interactions that are required to move the story forward and some that are optional details that shed light on the characters in the story. Beyond this, however, the game’s world is cluttered with details. Observing these details, such as book titles or drawings or objects scattered about, the player gets to build a better understanding about the characters and the world they inhabit without being told anything explicitly through the text/audio logs in the game. These clues also allow us, as players, to form our own opinions about the Finch family as the stories told to us are often in conflict with one another and provided by unreliable narrators. In this sense, we get to make our own way through the world, accepting certain pieces of information and casting aside others. The detailed environment invites players to play at their own pace.
Ultimately, the game feels as though you are stepping into a family’s memory, a biased and false one at times, but a memory nonetheless. The vivid details create more of a story than even the dialogue itself, though the dialogue is beautiful, stripped back, and unintrusive, often physically guiding us through the environment as we follow the curvature of a sentence around a bend. We weave in and out of timelines as we navigate the labyrinthine house, crawling through shrines and memories.
The Finch Family Tree
There isn’t much violence in the game, certainly not explicit violence. However, the themes of the game are psychically dark and intense. At times, when we embody certain characters, we enact their suicides, which seems like a rather intense experience for a fourth grader to play (which is the recommended age by some websites). Because the game heavily interacts with violent death and suicide, even if not explicitly shows, there is a lot of room for error. However, the game designers handle such themes with deft and composure, never insisting on explanations but rather leaning into the emotions of the characters to speak on behalf of the experiences. I noticed that whenever a death occurred, there was never too much text nor distracting elements/mechanisms to allow space for reflection. Though this game doesn’t have much violence, its narrative is propelled by death. This death isn’t the stuff of normal video games whereby a death is incidental and unremarkable. Rather, the grief is palpable, complex, and inexplicable, mirroring real human experience.
