What Remains of Edith Finch
PC, PS4 | $30 | WWW.EDITHFINCH.COM Step into another family home.
Edith Finch’s family has a habit of dying young, so she’s trying to get to the bottom of the curse before she, at the age of 17, also becomes a victim.
This game begins as a Gone Home- like exploration into an empty Pacific Northwestern home. The most striking thing about the Finch manor is how normal it is. It looks like a house that people lived in, built to proper proportions and furnished in an entirely mundane manner, albeit with more books than you may expect. The sealed rooms are strange, but in a way, that speaks of eccentricity rather than anything sinister.
Then we discovered the shrine to Molly Finch, who died in 1947 at ten years of age. Molly’s story is as out-ofleft-field as anything we’ve ever encountered in a video game and it ended on a note of unexpected, disturbing darkness.
The family stories told in What Remains of Edith Finch are filtered through the lens of time, and the closer they come to Edith’s own life, the less fantastical they seem. Most of us probably know someone like Lewis, a kind young man with a keen mind who just couldn’t find his way in this world. And even when the story moves into unambiguously dangerous territory — the death of an infant, which you will not just witness but participate in — it does so with remarkable grace.
Edith Finch is a guided tale with few opportunities to explore off the beaten path. There’s no inventory or choices to be made, and while hotspots require a bit of exploring nothing is really hidden. But the stories of the Finch family more than make up for that narrow focus. Reading each of the memorials to family members took me on a unique adventure through different first-person formats: we got to know Grandpa Sam through the lens of a manual-focus camera, we flew a kite with Gus over a beach, we even became the ruler of a video game kingdom. It was amazing to see so many different styles handled so well in a single game.
We were frustrated at first by the checkpoint save system but they soon became irrelevant: What Remains of Edith Finch isn’t a long game and it was so enthralling that we had no interest in stopping.
As the branches of Edith’s family tree grow closer to her own life, it enables her to speak more personally about them — a shift in perspective that gives her words an emotional heft that’s lacking when she’s reflecting on someone she never met.
The end of the game was intensely sad: we could feel the inevitability of Edith and Great-Grandmother Edie’s looming last day together and dreaded it. You will feel as though you’ve grown to understand these Finches, and you will miss them knowing they’re gone.
This is a masterful piece of storytelling — deftly told, uplifting in places and devastating in others. Avoid spoilers (we can’t think of a game more in need of being unspoiled than this one) and experience it. Andy Chalk