[Review] What Remains of Edith Finchw

[R e i]

Game Informations

Genre:Adventure

Developer:Gian Sparrow

Publisher:Annapurna Interactive

Relase Date:Windows, PlayStation 4 April 25, 2017 Xbox One July 19, 2017 Nintendo Switch July 4, 2019

 

 

IIexpected What Remains of Edith Finch to be weird and vaguely menacing, but instead found it to be heartbreakingly sweet. Developer Giant Sparrow is no stranger to sadness. Its previous game, The Unfinished Swan, is about a young boy coming to terms with the death of his mother. Sadness is a difficult thing to convey convincingly in a game. Grief is more easily evoked — kill off a favorite character and boom, your player is sad and angry and hurt and all the things that come with a loss. But true sadness, inextricably interwoven with love, is not such an easy lever to pull. What Remains of Edith Finch is a very sad game, because it does the hard work of letting you get to know each member of the Finch family before taking them away. Those lives, experienced through brief flashbacks, make you love those people just enough to genuinely miss them when you remember they’re gone.You play as the titular Finch, returning home for the first time in seven years. Her entire family is gone, though that's no spoiler. In fact, it's the Finch family’s shtick. The Finches have always believed themselves to be under a curse, and they all died long before their time — sometimes mysteriously, sometimes tragically. The truth about those deaths was always a murky area for Edith; her mom didn’t like talking about the past, and the stories told by her grandma Edie were difficult to believe. In What Remains of Edith Finch, Edith moves from room to room, reading the stories of each demise and piecing together her family history, hoping the house will give up its secrets.One thing I absolutely love about the house itself is how incredibly lived-in in feels. It doesn’t come across as a set designed around the idea of a video game level, but rather a home that a dozen members of an impossibly creative family lived in over several generations. Part of this comes at the cost of interactivity – there’s very little in the house you can actually touch or mani[CENSORED]te. Like a museum, there’s a “look, but don’t touch” policy here. But honestly, this didn’t bother me given how much I enjoyed the act of meticulously looking at every beautiful detail of the world.

 

 

To call What Remains of Edith Finch a game may be slightly disingenuous; it’s more of a storybook. You’ll open some journals, flip some switches and turn a key or two, but by and large you’re roaming the empty halls of the sprawling Finch house as the story is read to you. Edith learns about each character’s death by examining a note or diary left behind in their bedroom, the words spilling out on the screen as you take on the role of the doomed branch of her family tree. The creativity and care given to make sure each story feels uniquely tuned to the person it’s describing kept What Remains of Edith Finch from growing boring. It takes some monumentally deft storytelling to make the death of children — including a baby — anything other than horrifying. Instead, each tale is beautiful in its own sad way. Sam, Lewis and Barbara’s stories are particularly well-crafted, and Milton’s will be a joy for fans of The Unfinished Swan. But Gregory’s passing is the one that will stay with me for a long, long time. It's a crushingly ordinary moment, painful because unlike some other Finch tales, it’s all too plausible.What Remains of Edith Finch is focused almost entirely on several people dying in sometimes terrible ways, but it isn’t gruesome or creepy. Deaths aren’t played for effect, or self-indulgently drawn out to mani[CENSORED]te. They’re not unfair tragedies that a forgiving universe would never allow. Death is a thing that happens, and that’s how What Remains of Edith Finch treats it. It’s not about ends. It’s about Barbara, the child actress, and Lewis, who worked at the cannery. It’s about Sven, who enjoyed woodcarving, and Calvin, who liked rocket ships. It’s about remembering that people are more than just how they ended.Though it only took me just under two hours to complete, the second the credits stopped rolling I immediately restarted What Remains of Edith Finch. Each of the vignettes is so distinct and surprising that I didn’t have enough time to absorb and dissect what I had just played before being whisked away to the next one. But after fully piecing together the threads of the family and sifting through the allegories of their final moments, I was left with a beautiful, heartbreaking mosaic that exudes life, even when mired in death.

 

 

Giant Sparrow seamlessly transports the player from one character to another, shifting viewpoints and time periods through three generations of a family. To describe any of the stories within the game is to say too much, as each chapter is so distinct from the last in terms of gameplay, aesthetic and setting. The only thing every episode shares is the first-person perspective and simple move, look and click controls. Only in one brief flying and swimming sequence did the interface feel like a hindrance; otherwise it is beautifully integrated. The analogue stick is used to turn a key in a lock, or wind up a music box and turn the pages of book. The effect is tactile rather than testing. The interior of the house is a character in itself, and to learn more about it, you have to explore. The level of detail means that really understanding a space takes more than a moment’s pause, but nothing in the world is surplus: the clutter has a narrative purpose. A wheelchair with an oxygen bottle attached tells one story, as does the modern stairlift in this old house. Even the takeaway boxes and the dishes still smeared with food have a tale to tell. And then there are the books. The Finches were obviously big readers because books are stacked everywhere. The titles vary depending on whose room you’re in – in one you may find Treasure Island sitting beside a book on Japanese manners, in another you’ll see a favourite family cookbook lying open on the table, as if it has been left mid-read. And the game itself acts as a book, with text sitting along the top of a gate or wrapping around the back of an armchair, as Edith narrates. Words may dissolve or letters scatter in the wind, depending where the story travels.Each beautifully detailed bedroom is a mausoleum for a Finch relative, but all the doors are locked, so the path inside is often ingenious and disorienting. A hatch in the floor of one room leads to a tunnel, which then leads to a ladder in another and then Edith climbs through a picture to find the story within. As she explores the rooms, she’s transported into tales of the characters’ last moments. These stories-within-a-story play with ideas of the unreliable narrator, as well as the blurring of fiction and reality. It’s a game about the stories families tell each other and how memories become fiction and then history, before morphing into their own kind of truth.

 

 What Remains of Edith Finch system requirements
(minimum)
Memory:2 GB
Graphics Card:NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750
CPU:Intel Core i3-2125
What Remains of Edith Finch File Size:5 GB
OS:Windows Vista SP2 64-bit or later
(recommended)
Memory:4 GB
Graphics Card:NVIDIA GeForce 510
What Remains of Edith Finch CPU:Intel Core 2 Duo E8400

 

 

 

Edited July 4, 2020 by Rei™