Edith Finch is a Game about (not) Telling Stories

Spoiler warning. If you care enough to click on the this article, spend the two hours and twenty bucks it takes to experience this game yourself. There is no summary; I expect you to know the game. Support indie devs and wash your hands. Thanks.

What Remains of Edith Finch loves text. It puts each line of dialogue onscreen, as a physical thing in its world. It loves to animate them swinging as a character wields a sledgehammer, to watch a lament peel off a dandelion, to gather poetry with a kite. The text is the story of the game, and it wants that story be real, for it to be positioned in space and tactile. Can you reach out and grab it? Can you taste the flakes of story falling onto your tongue?

This was not my first walking simulator. I expected a mystery I would need to unravel by noticing details and remembering everything I was told. As I walked towards the house towering out of the woods, I wanted to know its secrets, to find what the game had planted for me. I engaged with it on this level, not quite to the point of taking notes but drinking in each dripping line of dialogue, to rehydrate names into characters as quickly as possible. I went through the first floor of the house methodically, trying to take in the mystery. A cataclysmic last night was mentioned more than once. Okay, that’s intriguing, I’m sure we’ll hear more about that later. There was an “old house”, and it sank? If you say so, game.

And I engaged with it on the level of game design, having watched far too many videos on the topic on YouTube. I appreciated that it would be convenient, as a writer, to have the bedrooms sealed off. It was a way to force my character through the story in a controlled, linear fashion, and it justified having the pristine childhood rooms of my great aunts. And other designer tricks: jumping through the tree, I noticed how the cat’s next move is always toward the light. I marveled at the economy of making a story by stringing together scenes that, on their own, were barely tech demos. (Insert Half Life joke here.) And I appreciated how everything interactable was indicated in white, keeping me from pixel hunting. I think the game does a good job of suggesting how I move or rotate an object with the joystick, without being so literal about it as to break immersion. (I love you Cyan, but fix that for Firmament. Please.)

I engaged on these levels so much that I didn’t take the ending for what it was. There must be a way to find the second half of Edie’s story, I was convinced. I’ve played more than one game with a bad, fake-out ending. How do I get back into the library in the present to find the second half of that book? There had to be more story. I spent awhile looking for it, in exactly the wrong place.

Return of the Obra Dinn — another game about walking around and finding vignettes where people die — does so with the aid of an overtly supernatural pocketwatch. But Edith Finch leaves us with that MacBeth-ian question of how much the supernatural is the blame for the story’s tragedy.

The level that I failed to engage with the game on, the one that I completely missed, is the level of common sense. What would I really do if I saw a house rooms tacked on to the roof? Edith, she states multiple times, grew up here and thought it was normal — but you or I would have some second thoughts about going up there, or climbing along tree branches, or crawling through tunnels, especially while pregnant.

I was only shown this level of the game by a video that, if you’re looking for Edith Finch analysis online, you’ve probably already seen:

Now look at this scene again and realize that Edie and Sven built a swing on a tree on the top of a goddamn fucking cliff where even at a normal swing arc the kids would be close to dangling to death if the slightest thing went wrong. Or the pathetic-looking broken fence that might be more inclined to impale them if they fell rather than stop them from going over the edge.

It’s that level of scrutinizing details, of not suspending any disbelief, of forcing yourself to react to this house and to this family as if they were really real, that leads you to the conclusion that there was no curse, no, the Finches were just fucking nuts.

Or, more formally: the Finches are painters, woodworkers, actors, daydreamers: driven, creative people. They don’t think about self-preservation; they raise their kids in a death-trap of a house that’s never heard of a building code, probably because no inspector wants to get close. The supposed curse is actually a self-fulfilling prophecy: the Finches act recklessly because the curse gives them an excuse if something goes wrong. So where did this sick mentality come from?

There’s a reading of Dark Souls that says that everything you learn about the Age of Fire is placed by those who benefit from its continuation. Only subtly, mostly by environmental clues and out-of-universe common sense, does the game lead you to reject that establishment view. What Dark Souls did for sociology — these narratives were devised and promulgated to protect the powerful despite being clearly harmful — Edith Finch does for psychology — the narratives protect the people in these stories from confronting their own faults and manias, causing them to be unconcerned with their children’s safety.

In both cases, following the establishment’s narrative leads to your character’s self-destruction. In Dark Souls your character has an alternative choice, but the remaining Finches can’t change. Edith finds herself pregnant at seventeen, and virtually all of her son’s characterization is the cast on his arm. Only the player has the opportunity to see how not-normal this house and this family truly are.

The player, and Edith’s mother Dawn. Reading her name symbolically, we can imagine her wanting a fresh start for herself and for her children. It doesn’t turn out that way. “My children are dead because of your stories!” is one of the few lines of dialogue that push the player away from the supernatural reading. In Lewis’ case, it’s literally true; his runaway imagination didn’t merely justify his death, it caused it: stories are dangerous. Dawn is built up to be the antagonist for much of the game, serving to obstruct the player in their quest to learn the stories, even ripping that book out of her daughter’s hand, implying — so I thought — that I should go looking for the other half. But Dawn is also the hero of the game, doing as best she can to protect herself and her children. Of course, she fails. I guess that makes it a tragedy. Which is a type of story.

I think back to the tower of haphazard wooden stairs and floors jutting out above the treetops, strata of bedrooms, and I realize: the house literally has too many stories tacked on to it. It has the same flaw as the family that inhabited it.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a story that wants you to reject stories. It wants you to see past the narratives that Edie, and Edith, and the game’s floating text have all constructed. Put the lillies down kid, let’s go live someplace safe and sensible. It’s what Grandma Dawn would have wanted.

References

Joseph Anderson, The Villain of Edith Finch (swing on top of a cliff)

Huntress X Thompson, Dark Souls, STALKER, and the Tyranny of the Prevailing Narrative (a reading of Dark Souls)