What Remains of Edith Finch (Xbox One)
The walking simulator genre is one that carries such a persistent negative stigma for many gamers that it may be one of the few cases where a derogatory term for the genre has become the main name for it. Some alternate titles like narrative exploration games have been put forward that haven’t really caught on, but the reason walking simulator stuck was because of how many games in the genre feature minimal interactivity and often rely on the environment or notes you need to read to tell the story. These traits make it pretty easy to develop a walking simulator and thus many of them are rather bland, but if you ever need a game that really exemplifies what these style of games can be, you need look no further than What Remains of Edith Finch, a game that has the same immersive feel and player-lead discovery that makes the genre appealing in the first place while also providing interesting activities and a more involved approach to learning the game’s story from notes you discover.
In fact, the story itself begins with someone cracking open the journal of Edith Finch, the entire game a reenactment of the words she left behind. Edith Finch is a member of the unusual Finch family who have been dying in strange and often unexplained ways for generations. To try and escape the curse, her mother flees the family home in a hurry with Edith, Edith returning to it years later to try and find some clue to what’s been causing the strange events that surround her family history. The Finch house is itself an area with plenty of character, each generation of the family adding new rooms and special passages to it so the building expanded with their numbers, only for old rooms to get sealed off or hidden as family members met their unusual ends. The expansions lead to the building growing taller and taller and more haphazard in its construction, with plenty of areas like a library and home school added as the Finches pulled themselves deeper inward in response to their ill fortune. Already on its own, uncovering more of the house is interesting enough to motivate looking for hidden passages or ways around locked doors, seemingly basic environmental details suddenly becoming meaningful as you learn more about the former occupants and just what life had in store for them.
While exploring the house through a first-person view, Edith will comment on her adventure, recounting memories of the family members she knew or how her grandmother described them to her, ensuring that none of the stranger sights go without some clue as to why they ended up that way. However, where things get much more interesting is when the player manages to find one of the accounts of a Finch family member. While these do take the form of diaries, letters, and notes Edith is reading, the way it is presented in game is absolutely marvelous, each note unfolding into a fanciful and unique experience born from that person’s perspective on their final moments. This is no better exemplified than the feverish dreams of Molly Finch, whose imagination runs wild and ends up with the player setting off to explore the wilderness while taking on the forms of all manner of animals like a cat, owl, and even a shark. While there are no failure states for these excursions into fantasy, they all end up playing out in different ways that encourage the player to complete small objectives that don’t force the player to do anything more than enjoy the experience. The creativity on show makes even something simple like a baby playing with bath tub toys an experience both narratively moving and just a joy to take part in, the baby’s mind free to imagine his toys participating in a synchronized routine matched to Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers. In another, you find yourself at first working a mundane job at a fish factory, only for the imagination of Lewis Finch to take you on a fantasy journey of sailing and kingships at the same time, the player playing both the mundane job and daydream in tandem while deciding just what twists and turns this flight of fancy takes.
Seeing just how the next Finch family member will have their history told makes every find rewarding, even for the less involved ones. It is a bit of a shame that Odin Finch, a man who literally sailed his entire house across the sea, didn’t get a small gameplay segment to participate in it, but each family member’s moment in the spotlight stands out for both telling their fate in a more artistic and emotional manner and one that brings the player a new experience. Some, like the fate of child starlet Barbara Finch, even have their own unique art style, the entire segment playing out as interactive comic panels that match both the visual style and the narrative structure of the art form it’s imitating. The focus on such exaggerated accounts told by narrators who seem to have more fanciful views of the world can often mean the exact fate of a family member is left to interpretation, the ultimate answer to the Finch’s curse itself even not fully explained, but there is still enough present to surmise an acceptable and reasonable explanation… or you too can join in trying to find more to reality and explain it with something outside the realm of normal understanding. It’s a game that straddles that line where you are allowed to find satisfying answers without any being too obvious as the actual truth, and none of these creative retellings sacrifice believability if you choose to tear back the layers of metaphorical imagery. Mysteries will remain, but not the kind that hurt to ponder.
Nothing is done in half-measures when it is included though. A segment that takes you back to Halloween actually uses the musical theme from the movie Halloween to further establish a realistic setting without taking away from the imagined world of the game where a movie called My Friend Bigfoot turned Barbara Finch into the Shirley Temple of this fictional world. Even when a segment is simpler in scope like a kid flying a kite to collect the tale of his fate in the sky, it still has interesting visual elements that enhance the play and make it fun to play with, and while these stories all end sadly, there’s still a range of emotion to be found in their presentation. Tragedy, comedy, and even mundanity are conveyed well both with the fantastically varied and creative presentations and what gameplay actions you’ll be performing during these exaggerated memories. Interspersed with segments of exploring the strange house, What Remains of Edith Finch manages to make its short runtime both perfectly paced but also over far too soon, progress obvious as the house opens up but the desire to see more of the game’s clever ways of conveying the past making it a game that could have kept going so much longer if it had wanted to do so. It contains slow moments between the huge highlights of seeing what new twist awaits the next Finch family member’s flashback segment, but as part of exploring the family home, those slow moments do give you plenty to look at if you choose to take your time and breathe in the personalization and the subtle tales told by the less interactive environmental details of this eccentric twist on reality.
THE VERDICT: The mystery behind the Finch family curse is reason enough to want to explore the absurd abandoned family home that already has a strong identity from how it was built and what was left behind, but when What Remains of Edith Finch begins to tell you the stories of Edith’s unfortunate relatives, it then evolves from a well-crafted bit of narrative exploration into a marvelous tale that features imaginative and enjoyable flights of fancy. History is conveyed with such creative artistry to it that each tale enraptures with its new but accessible form of play and its commitment to its style and message. The shorter and simpler Finch histories you find would already be a step above reading simple notes, but when paired with some of the top quality creations created for certain members, its hard not to crave more from a game that already takes the design of walking simulators and injects them with energy and interactivity without sacrificing atmospheric detail or an emotional narrative.
And so, I give What Remains of Edith Finch for Xbox One…
A FANTASTIC rating. It took me until now to really realize the simplest way to describe the family histories is as a set of diverse minigames, but that’s because such a game mechanic focused term was far from my mind due to the excellent weaving of narrative purpose with creative interactivity that they are. There is always some quirk to them, even the simplest ones, that give them a level of character that match their subject, their fate, and introduce something special to what could already be a rather well-designed bit of narrative exploration. The house already has so much love put into populating its rooms with reflections of its former residents that you can tell what a character is like before you even view the world through their eyes. The grounded and realistic exploration serves as a counterbalance for the vivid and fanciful windows into the Finch family’s past, the two combining into an absolutely artistic experience, one where the play is purposeful without being difficult but still enjoyable to participate in for how it contextualizes the stories being told, the sound, visuals, and framing all bringing these moments together into stellar experiences.
What Remains of Edith Finch is truly a game about exploring a narrative. Its world is designed to paint a vivid picture of the family’s past, but by taking you into the mind of its characters to view their final moments through their oddly tinted lenses it takes things even further, the actions you take in these imaginative visions just as important to the tale being told due to their purpose and how they are conveyed. While you may never truly meet most of the Finch family, you will get to know them intimately and in a way that is both expressive and informative. What Remains of Edith Finch exemplifies what its genre can offer when work is put into every part of it, the environment, world, and story being so much more because of how expertly every piece works together to create this beautiful video game.