The narratives that we construct out of our own lives often don't make sense - they're created from snapshots, half-remembered memories, dreams, legends. Depending on our perspectives, we can turn ourselves into heroes or villains. We can believe that we're plagued by a curse, or a monster, or that we are alone, free of curses. The stories of our lives are not stories in the sense that they have comfortable beginnings, and neat endings. If the universe is, as Edgar Poe once wrote, "The perfect plot of God," then we are unable to construct perfect narratives simply because our perspective is too small, our ideas of the great design around us too out of proportion with the microscopic size of our minds.
What Remains of Edith Finch attempts to capture that feeling of an imperfect story - a family curse, that may not really be a curse at all. A ghost story, with all its horrors, where the ghost is always just out of reach. It's magical realism at its finest, with a magic that comes not from sparks and magic spells, but from the strangeness of experience, and the attempt to piece together the gaps between experience and mystery.
What Remains of Edith Finch is the story of a young woman who returns to her family home years after it's been abandoned, in an attempt to piece together the story of what happened there. Several years ago her mother and her left in a hurry, after the death of her last sibling, leaving behind an abandoned legacy, and the fragments of a curse.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a first person narrative game set in the illustrious and enigmatic Finch house. The house at takes on gothic proportions, with its sealed-shut rooms, crazy and often ridiculous characters, careful memorials of deceased relatives, and the display of the original house sunken into the waters nearby.
The game was created by Giant Sparrow, who have only released one previous game, Unfinished Swan. Edith Finch will automatically call to mind comparisons to "Gone Home," because of its lush, lived-in feel, its attention to detail, and its devotion to realism.
Edith Finch consists of a series of gameplay vignettes, each one with a wildly different gameplay structure and story. The only thing they all have in common is that they end with the narrator's death. I don't want to give anything away - but the vignettes wonderfully manage to capture a variety of tones and characters, and anyone interested in game design would be served well to see how Edith Finch uses different mechanics and environment to convey powerful emotions.
My major complaint with Edith Finch is the gameplay length - for the $19.99 you pay on Steam, you get just a little under two hours of gameplay, depending on how fast you move through the house. Some sacrifices to length must be made with the intricate detail of the environments and the variety of gameplay that the game offers. I found myself wishing that I could spend more time in the house, with the Finches and their mystery stories.
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