What Remains of Edith Finch, or the Beautiful Horror of Inevitability
Having spent most of my childhood’s summer holidays in a big house full of old memories, this game instantly struck a chord. Even if it wasn’t where I grew up, it carried the same fascinating, mystical feeling that came from exploring an old house and discover treasures that belonged to another time. The stories we made up as children; how vivid, how passionate they were! This game brings it all back with great sensibility and cleverness.
[WARNING, SPOILERS AHEAD — you’ve been warned!]
What Remains of Edith Finch is an adventure game developed by Giant Sparrow and published by Annapurna Interactive for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2017, and for Nintendo Switch in 2019. You play as Edith Finch, last in the Finch family line, who has returned to her family’s home following her mother’s death to explore the now-abandoned house. As the player, you’ll quickly understand that the family line is cursed: all but one member of each generation died in an unusual way.
Ian Dallas, writer/director, hoped that What Remains of Edith Finch would evoke “the sublime horror of nature”. The dreading sense of fate — of inevitability — guides you through the whole experience. as you explore the sealed rooms of your dead relatives. It’s a game about the stories we tell ourselves, but also on what is kept hidden and the consequences. What caused the Finch family’s demise? A curse? A monster? Or just a family who’s legend was so heavy it ended up crushing them?
NARRATIVE DESIGN — TELLING STORIES THROUGH THE ENVIRONMENT & GAMEPLAY ELEMENTS
What Remains of Edith Finch won the Best Narrative award at the Game Awards 2017, and it makes tremendous sense. “When a game is recognized for its narrative, it’s not just of a brilliant script or a cool cutscene but also for the journey it takes us on as players.” And oh boy, what a journey that was!
From a shark falling from a tree to bath toys flying in the air while dancing to the Waltz of the Flowers, you certainly don’t expect any of what’s going to happen. Throughout the game, we’re stuck between fantasy and reality, past and present. The stories bring us into all sorts of magical worlds, bright or grim, while the house is anchored in the dusty present, terribly empty as the dim light of the ending day reflects on empty Chinese take-out boxes.
The House Itself Looks like a Creature, a Monster, « a Smile with Too Many Teeth »
What Remains of Edith Finch has a first-person point of view, so the player sees everything through the character’s eyes (this will be very important for later). You start the game on a boat on your way to somewhere. As you look down, you notice that you have what seems to be a diary on your lap, with your name on it. You open it, and the voice-over starts: “I’m just going to start at the beginning, with the house.”
You first see the haunted-looking house from afar, and there’s already something strange to it, it feels… alive and looks like a pile of memories stacked up onto each other, or crooked (family) tree branches. As you open the mailbox (which by the way is an adorable mini version of the house), you see unopened “urgent” bills from 7 years ago. The dark trees and the gray sky heighten the creepiness of the house: what terrible accident led to the obviously hasty flight of all its inhabitants?
As you sneak inside through the doggy door, you’ll immediately notice that there are objects everywhere, tons of them: books, pictures, toys, dirty dishes, unattended diaries… it’s hard to believe this house has been empty for 7 years. The “tour de force” of this game is to create a dialogue with its characters without any actual dialogues. The objects are so full of meaning; you don’t have to talk to Molly to know she loves animals, or to meet Lewis to understand that he has an overflowing imagination. Each room tells a story, and each time you feel like you’ve stepped behind a painting.
The house is vertical, which is perfect to frame a linear story: as Edith climbs the stairs to go higher and higher, she goes down the Finch family tree. The sealed doors are also perfect to justify the fact that Edith keeps on climbing: each new birth meant that a new room had to be built on top of the others. I mentioned before that there’s no dialogue in the main game, but you are guided by text directly inserted into the surroundings.
The narration is inherently part of the game; it is even at times part of the gameplay: the letters and words become the world around you and interacting with it allows you to know what happened next: the words form a path to follow, guiding you through the dusty house and the lives of its former owners.
The Story of the Finches
Molly’s room is the first one that we as a player explore, and it’s actually where it all started for the developers. What Remains of Edith Finch was, in fact, a game that was supposed to take place underwater. They then shifted directions because telling a story while the main character is scuba diving was too much of a challenge. As explained in this article from PC Gaming that goes over the game’s making off, it’s only three or four months into development that the image of a shark falling 30 to 40 in the grounds emerged, bringing a comic edge to the story.
“It was only right that Molly’s flight of fancy should come first in the story chronology, Dallas tells us, since everything grew organically from it. That key line, spoken with childlike guilelessness (“and suddenly I was a shark”) now seems like a disarmingly candid acknowledgment of the game’s unlikely origins. “It’s an introduction to the player, just like it was an introduction to us as developers, into what this game is going to feel like,” Dallas says.” PC Gaming
You might wonder how they could bring humor to tragic deaths, especially when you’re witnessing the death of Gregory, a one-year-old baby. The most common scheme of these stories is “oh that’s fun gameplay! Wow, such cool surroundings! Haha, that’s clever! Wait a minute, is he going to… oh, oh no”, a thought process perfectly illustrated by Jacksepticeye in his let’s play at 12:22:
The game’s narrative design is really clever in that it plays with the idea of no real consequences when playing a video game. Even if you die, you just have to push the restart button and all will be forgotten, right? Well, not here. As we said earlier, the designers made the choice of making the player look through a first-person point of view. You’re actually incarnating each Finch family member, and as you actively watch each story unravel, you’re leading the characters to their inevitable death. You’re in control, you’re the one making Calvin go higher & higher on his swing set, or as you’ve seen in the video above, making Gregory’s toys fly and fall on the bath’s tap. And as horrifying as it might be you have no choice but to keep playing. It’s the beautiful horror of inevitability.
What Reminds of Edith Finch shows us how powerful storytelling via video games can be, how perfect a medium it is for engaging the player: you’re no longer a spectator, you’re living each life, and each death. You profoundly connect with the Finches, especially in Lewis’ story, which I found was the most impressive one in terms of narrative design, even more so when I discovered it almost got cut:
“A more demanding original schedule would, Dallas admits, probably have led to some stories being cut, the two most likely candidates being those of Gregory and Lewis Finch. If you’ve played the game, you’ll understand what a loss they would have been. “They ended up in places we were really happy with,” Dallas says, “But they were not sure things for a long, long time. They were really hard to pull off.”
In Lewis’ story, the gameplay perfectly illustrates the dichotomy between Lewis’ real life and his imaginary world. On the right side on the screen, you can see the cannery he works at, and you only use one joystick to repeat the same gesture over & over again: chopping fish heads off. On the left side of the screen (which grows bigger and bigger as Lewis slowly falls into madness), you progress in complex and colorful settings: a village, a sea and finally a palace.
Conclusion: An Interactive Elegy
What Remains Edith Finch is a game about empathy, as Ian Dallas explains:
“I was really nervous about any maudlin sentimentality, maybe to the game’s detriment,” he says. “One of the things we talked about a lot, right up until we shipped, was what Edith should say at the very end of the game — like, her last line. But I just feel it’s really manipulative to have something that is consciously trying to pull at your heartstrings like that. It’s ultimately unnecessary and kind of shoddy. For me, it starts and ends with empathy — it’s about creating a space where you are encouraged and allowed the time to feel empathy for someone else.”
Each story is a gem set in the family tree, and as you progress in the game you realize how poetic and beautiful death can be when you take all the sadness away. To me, this game was a magnificent elegy: a poem of mourning, of what is lost, that managed to address death with great sensibility, and even a touch of humor. In the end, we’ll never know if the stories are really what happened to the Finches, but does it really matter?
If you played What Remains of Edith Finch, which story did you like best & why? Let’s discuss it in the comments!