I’m not a gamer by any measure of the word—I can’t aim in a first-person-shooter to save my life, and I regularly run my character into walls in any given genre—but I would enthusiastically become one for a particular type of gaming experience.
Specifically, I’d like to relive journeys like What Remains of Edith Finch, released in 2017 by Annapurna Interactive, over and over again. My partner and I bought this game for Xbox on the Microsoft store at the beginning of spring pandemic quarantine, figuring that we had so much time on our hands, we could take it slow and puzzle through the story at a leisurely pace. Instead, we finished it in two nights. The below is why.
Edith Finch unfolds like a drama miniseries or episodic novel, following the titular young woman to Washington’s San Juan Islands years after an incident of familial trauma as-yet unrevealed. We learn that Edith’s mother is gone, and Edith has journeyed back to her family’s ancestral home, a sprawling, rickety, Tim Burton-esque dwelling that has swelled over the centuries to tower over a stretch of rugged coastline. The original structure was ferried across the ocean by historical patriarch Odin Finch, who drowned in the effort and became the first ancestor to be interred in the family graveyard in the shadow of the growing house—thus the Norway-transplanted Finches begin their Washingtonian genealogy with death.
Edith carries nothing with her but a key and a journal, and via first-person exploration of the richly appointed and now abandoned Finch house environment, we help her fill in the blanks of her family tree.
The atmospheric great room of the sprawling Finch house
Generational tragedy clings to the family home like dust. We learn right off the bat that the Finches believe themselves cursed since before Odin, each member bound to perish in ways ranging from the ordinary to the supernatural, sometimes by accident and sometimes by their own hand or a stranger’s. Edith’s grandmother has sealed and memorialized each room like shrines to each vanished family member, and vanished herself as well. As Edith, we unseal these rooms and towers to open music boxes, read diaries, and peer at photos…all the while piecing together the mystery of why she and her mother abruptly fled the house years ago, as well as the more distant mystery of each Finch’s untimely death.
There are lots of opportunities for interaction with the environment
Months later, I still think about this gaming experience regularly. It’s like no other game I’ve read about or attempted before. It lingers for a few reasons, chief among which is the game’s insanely high production value. A wealth of personal details fills each room, from a grandmother’s unfinished painting to local takeout menus to tins upon tins of fish brought home by a brother who worked, for a time, at a nearby cannery. Not a single detail is extraneous—it all serves to gently elegize the Finches who lived and died before Edith, their presences still keenly felt in their eerily preserved rooms.
Just as the strange, sad twists of each Finch demise keep us guessing from unlocked room to unlocked room, the gameplay also keeps us on our toes. No two scenes are alike, and at each transition, there is a period of trial and adjustment while we figure out what exactly the newly unfolding story is asking of us. (SPOILERS FOLLOW) In “reliving” each death, we get to creep along branches as a hungry cat, guide an aunt through a comic book thriller, fly a kite in a storm, and find our way out of a nuclear bunker, among other things, experiencing a staggering variety of gameplay and storytelling modes that are all still elegantly and coherently linked. What’s more, it’s worth noting that in Edith Finch we do not merely decode the details of an untimely Finch death; we literally push the buttons that precipitate each demise, swinging a child off a cliff and putting a man in the path of industrial chopping machinery. (SPOILERS END)
But why so much death? Isn’t Edith Finch then just a gratuitously and exhaustingly macabre exercise in tumbling from sad story to sad story at breakneck speed? Not at all—and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say I probably won’t grasp the full extent of the game’s poetry of pain, acceptance, grief and trauma for years to come.
Each episode is deeply moving and rendered with such loving sensitivity and dreamlike serenity, as though in the process of dying, each family member finds a kind of peace and wonder in the way they are leaving the world. Often the Finches are killed by the things they love doing, or by unexpected, freak consequences of a decision they stood steadfastly behind. In other words, each manner of death embodies the essence of the person who passed, as much as the contents of their memorial bedroom do. As a result, the arc of each episode peaks with a player realization of “oh, of course this is how it happens, of course this is how it had to happen”—a clever audience replication of the sense of fatedness that the Finches feel about their bloodline, as well as an affirmation of the deceased’s unique personhood.
We (and Edith) aren’t exploring the house to solve the problem of the Finches, exactly, but to process, understand and accept the cyclical, sprawling tragedy endured by the family. It sounds grim…but in real life, isn’t that often all we can do when faced with private heartbreak?
