Dead Diary
Step into another family home in What Remains of Edith Finch.
My name is Edith Finch, and I’m a 17-year-old girl with a problem: My family has a habit of dying young. Only Edie, my great-grandmother, bucked the trend. She was also the chronicler of the family history, whose strange stories are tied with the estate that housed the clan for decades. And now, at the beginning of What Remains of Edith Finch, I’m the last one left—and I’ve come to learn the truth about the family curse. It begins as a GoneHome- 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 I discovered the shrine to Molly Finch, who died in 1947 at ten years of age. My god, what a ride. Molly’s story is as out-of-left-field as anything I’ve ever encountered in a videogame and it ended on a note of unexpected, and disturbing, darkness. By the time it was over I believed that I’d been faked out, and that What Remains of Edith Fin ch was a straight-up horror tale about a ‘real’ family curse that only comes out at night. But that, like so much of the game, was a deft bit of misdirection.
The family stories told in What Remains of Edith Fin ch are filtered through the lens of time, and the closer they come to Edith’s own life the less fantastical they seem. Yet while their demises grow less fanciful as their lives become familiar, the impact of their losses strike more powerfully. 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 that are interspersed through Edith’s journey more than make up for that narrow focus. Reading each of Edie’s memorials to family members took me on a unique adventure through different first-person formats: I got to know Grandpa Sam through the lens of a manual-focus camera, I flew a kite with Gus over a beach, I even became the ruler of a videogame kingdom. None of these interludes are complex, but it was amazing to see so many different styles handled so well in a single game.
Close to home
I was frustrated at first by the checkpoint save system, but they come at a decent frequency, and became irrelevant anyway: What Remains of Edith Fin ch isn’t along game, and it was so enthralling that I had no interest in stopping.
There are a decent number of settings to fiddle with, but the options to adjust the controls are almost nonexistent. Mouse sensitivity can be changed, although even at maximum it’s sluggish, and the WASD keys can’t be remapped. On the upside there are no other controls, so you’re not likely to break your brain trying to figure it out.
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, not because of the lost family members, but because of the lost family: I could feel the inevitability of Edith and Edie’s looming last day together and dreaded it. You will feel as though you’ve grown to understand these generations of the Finch family, and you will miss them knowing they’re gone.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a masterful piece of storytelling: Deftly told, uplifting in places, and devastating in others. Avoid spoilers (I can’t think of a game more in need of being unspoiled than this one) and experience it.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a masterful piece of storytelling