Critical Play: What Has Become of Edith Finch

It is a pity that due to the limitation of time I cannot experience the whole plot of the game, yet I still feel good about the game and succeed in do some observation.

What Has Become of Edith Finch is a narrative game of walking simulator. Player has a first-person view of the character controlled and can move and interact within the huge virtual world. Narrative elements are mostly embedded with the elements in the virtual world or related to the location of the player.

There are many features in the game other than the general rule conducted above. The first highlight is the smooth shifts of “subjectivity” from time to time. What “I” am is shifting as the narrative elements and behaviors are completed. Narrative elements are arranged in a proper way so that you cannot trigger too many elements at a time and get too much information to digest at a time, while the pace is not too slow. The game treats the texts as normal 3D objects in the world that emerge and disappear. “Never set a fix UI or element in a virtual world” is kind of a principle in virtual reality application, it also fits this case because if the texts stay fixed when the player switches a point of view, it would be unreal.

There are some triggers hidden in the house, which also provides some sense of solving a puzzle. In fact, the overall high degree of freedom combined with these triggers forms a “puzzle” of exploration.