What Remains of Edith Finch

I started playing Unfinished Swan from Giant Sparrow and stopped. Due to sheer boredom. Pelting a canvas with ink until something emerges wasn’t my idea of fun and still isn’t after all these long, grey years. so you can imagine my delight when I found out that What Remains… involved virtually no flicking of my ink. Oh, teehee. What the game does involve is your imagination, as you enter a world that could have been Gabriel García Márquez and Wes Anderson’s first and most earnest love child. 

You play Edith Finch in this artfully executed walking simulator as she returns to her family home  after inheriting it from her mother, moving through the house to chronicle the ancestral curse that had caused some pretty mysterious, some pretty disturbing, deaths. The house is a labyrinthine construct, full of secret rooms and tunnels, and every room you enter has an associated family member’s personality attached to it. Like Being John Malkovich, as you traverse the narrow crawl spaces and climb through hatches, you have the sense of consistently emerging into the person themselves. Pick up and look at that person’s favourite object and you’ll unlock an interactive cutscreen or mini-game that sheds further light on how they died.

And when I said virtually no flicking of your ink earlier, what may cause a dribble is how incredibly each family member’s story is told. From comic strips to a game where you control a character on a swing, which is so immersive, you truly feel like you’re eight again, every story grabs and holds your attention with a vice-grip. 

A personal take on the stories is that most contained an element of mental illness built into the fantastical: eating disorders, dissociative disorders and a narcissistic personality disorder to name a few, with the ‘disappearance’ of characters a potential nod to their suicides. The title of the game takes on a greater, almost desperate poignancy as you hope that enough remains of Edith that she can somehow escape the misfortune the rest of her family hadn’t. 

Pros: A genuinely amazing script, incredible music, art style and an imaginative take on how to differentiate the narrative for every character to the point where you feel a genuine connection to the family. It also doesn't tire itself out - I completed the game in a couple of hours. 

Cons: Uh...

My verdict: A solid 9/10.