What Remains of Edith Finch

The young protagonist, however, is not so interested in the supernatural implications as in the circumstances that led each of her relatives to a premature disappearance. So here I am wearing the clothes and through his eyes exploring every corner of the house, a real monument to the tragedy along which the whole narration unfolds. A subtle and never banal story, which stages a growing sense of horror without making it take on a concrete form: it is the crude reality of the facts that we are told, the events as they occurred without mystification whatsoever. There are no monsters under the bed or zombies on the corner of the corridor waiting for us, there is no rhetoric or morals, just a truth that we can not help but accept. And being the helpless witnesses of a destiny that will not spare us is more terrifying than any creature we could face armed with a gun.

Because, useless to ignore the elephant in the room, there is death waiting for Edith: we don't know when, we don't know how, but if there is a certainty it is that it won't be because of old age. Why then embark on this journey, unearthing a past that would be better forgotten? Why recall people who a supposed curse wanted disappeared too early, or violently? The impression left to me by What Remains of Edith Finch is that there is no mystery to solve, nor the will to discover something more about the tragedy that accompanies this family: to move Edith, and therefore in a certain sense to move the player, it is the will to discover the skeletons in the closet - the search for a ransom in the face of an announced death, in the pages of a diary that is our only travel companion.

The most striking aspect of What Remains of Edith Finch is the normality, although sometimes a little over the top, of the environment around us. As soon as I set foot in the house I found myself in front of a worldly good or bad furniture, where nothing really seemed out of place and, indeed, left the idea of never having been abandoned. All the rooms had been sealed but even that detail could not be out of tune in the context ... until I found the first secret passage and the small altar dedicated to the first of whose destiny I would discover. Molly, a girl who died nearly seventy years before the age of ten. The reason why the rooms were inaccessible began to make sense, however it was precisely reliving the story of Molly that the skill of Giant Sparrow emerged.

As expected from a walking simulator, What Remains of Edith FInch is a game in which exploration takes center stage and avoids intruding as much as possible into the narrative (narration in English and whose texts on the screen, specifically, are at in turn in English in the PlayStation version 4). The controls are reduced to the bone, with the only need for analog sticks and a button to interact with the environment given the extreme intuitiveness of the actions. The reality, however, is that What Remains of Edith Finch takes a step forward compared to the classic, and sometimes too trivial, concept of exploration: the game makes environmental immersion its strong point, managing to incorporate for each or almost eleven Finch family members whose past discover a different style and manage it perfectly. The moment Edith finds the crucial memory, here the perspective shifts to that of the person in question, changing not only in terms of atmosphere but also of gameplay.

Returning to the example of little Molly, I found myself involved in a dreamlike situation, an experience that I have hardly found in other video games and that has taken on, as it continued, stretches to the edge of the dark, not to say totally disturbing. Something that eventually left me with the suspicion that the Finch family story was indeed a horror story. I was wrong, or at least it was not the horror that I meant, made of evil and unfortunate entities involved in their thirst for revenge as in the most classic horror films of recent years.

As already mentioned, the game is very simple from the point of view of mechanics and interaction: there are no choices to make, some actions are carried out automatically, very few objects to be examined that are not directly connected to the objective in progress and, in the Overall, there are no puzzles that require commitment beyond observation. After all, the story is very guided and adding too many elements would have distracted from a fascinating narrative, even in its tragedy. A rendezvous with death in retracing a genealogical tree through multifaceted uses of the first person: I don't want to spoil it, because the surprise of the discovery is another of those aspects that struck me about What Remains of Edith Finch. None of these interludes are complex but it is wonderful to see how, although the focus is death, each one is incredibly full of life, characterized by a creativity that one would not expect in narrating their last moments.

It is a death told at the tip of your fingers, cruel without however falling into the grotesque or the bloody, and in discovering (or rather accepting) the truth, we witness a change in Edith herself, a different perspective which, compared to the beginning of the game, permeates her words of greater emotion towards people he has never known. A similar change of tones can be perceived in the house itself, which passes from gloomy and disturbing atmospheres to others, towards the end, almost fairytale. And it is precisely in its lyrical quality that the greatness of the game rests: in putting the pieces of a story that dates back to three generations before, Edith builds a narrative of her own, but leaves us the players to find the ultimate meaning. His goals, because he wanted to embark on this journey into memory, become clear at the end of the game and yet the final judgment is left entirely in our hands.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a macabre game, at times heartbreaking for what is to be defined as a huge injustice, but undeniably powerful: without the presumption of judging or teaching something, the Giant Sparrow team explores the good and the bad that every story has in itself, especially underlines how sometimes superstition is the worst of anchors, ready to drag us to the bottom and force us there.

MODUS OPERANDI
I played What Remains of Edith Finch on PS4 thanks to a game download code obtained from Sony. It took about two hours to complete it. The game is already available for PC too.

Still, we disagree: What Remains of Edith Finch is not a game about death. It's about life and leaves us falling into a nasty trap by putting death in the foreground: in the end, like the Finch family, we have to realize that we've been focusing on the wrong thing all along.

But we are not unhappy about it, because in its ten chapters the short but intense adventure game by Giant Sparrow introduces us to the members of the Finch family, who all came to a tragic end far too early. This creates an unusually emotional and melancholy experience that we rarely find in video games.

What remains is not sadness, but hope . Because Edith Finch is also an incredibly happy game that shows that death is senseless, absurd and unpredictable - just like life - and that in the end it might just be that we were there at all.

Looking for a curse

As Edith Finch we go on a search for the truth behind the supposed curse that weighs on her family. Her path leads her back to the abandoned house of her childhood, which is the linchpin of the different fates and which has remained unchanged since the death of her eldest brother and great-grandmother six years earlier.

The rotten remains of the last meal we had together are still on the table, the chairs are overturned, the electricity is turned off. The result of an abrupt departure into a new life in a desperate attempt to escape the family curse.

It doesn't want to succeed. Edith's mother Dawn dies a few years later and everything she has left for her daughter is a mysterious key to one of the many locks in Finch's house, which may explain the many tragedies behind. In search of the right castle, we wander through the abandoned home with Edith.

In every corner of the lovingly detailed environment hides a memory from Edith's childhood, which she writes in her diary. Like in an interactive picture book, the letters dance across the screen as she reads what has been written. It's a bit as if we're actually reading Edith's diary and listening to her thoughts.

Every room a new world

In each of the little stories, the gameplay helps us to trace what the person felt and experienced in the last moments of their life. Each room in the nested house is a sealed time capsule. A small museum, almost untouched since its former resident left it for the last time. Secret passages connect the various places and allow us to enter the previously inaccessible places. Each one represents a chapter, its own short story about the person who lived here.

That's how we get to know the cat-loving Molly, who died in 1947 at the age of only ten. Her brother Calvin, who loved astronauts and whom she never met. Her nephew Gregory, who, decades after Molly's death, had not even reached the age of two. And of course Edith, who had to bury two brothers, their two parents, an uncle and their grandmother.

With each new chapter What Remains of Edith Finch presents not only a completely new character, but also new game elements at the same time. Molly's childlike imagination lets us slip into the roles of various animals hunting for food after she's sent to bed without dinner. Suddenly we look through the eyes of a cat chasing a bird, before we become a rabbit-hunting owl, a seal-hungry shark, and finally even a man-eating monster snaking across a ship in search of prey.

The story of the former child star Barbara is told on the pages of a kitschy horror comic through which we steer the young woman. We experience the last moments of family man Sam exclusively through the lens of his camera and capture them ourselves in snapshots.

One of the most disturbing and fascinating experiences in What Remains of Edith Finch is the story of the cannery worker Lewis, who dreams of a better world on the assembly line. While we behead fish with the mouse, we control Dream Lewis with the keyboard through an ever-growing fantasy world that eventually devours the entire screen - and his sanity.

The end of the Finch family is never actually shown. Sometimes it is clear what happens at the end of one of the stories, sometimes it is left to our imagination. It almost always hits the heart.

More than a walking simulator

Whatever character we play, What Remains of Edith Finch's gameplay is minimalist. The adventure is more than a walking simulator, but still offers no puzzles outside of the individual stories. The biggest challenge is to understand the changing controls and to figure out what we actually have to do, because the game doesn't take us by the hand. There are no tutorials and no explanations. Like Edith, we're on our own.

In addition, we have to struggle with the different opening doors, hinges and flaps on the PC. What is very intuitive to control with the controller can quickly become fiddly. The controls were never really annoying. Even if the developers recommend the controller, you can still use the mouse and keyboard with a clear conscience.

The fact that hardly anything is explained to us goes well with the plot and atmosphere of the game, but at the same time it is also the element that is most likely to tear us out of it. For example, while as teenagers Gus fly a kite in the sky, it's not always clear what to do next. From a first person perspective, we look up at the sky and let the toy glide through the air while we more or less wait for something to happen.

Although the situation offers few possibilities, it is still not always obvious when we have to steer the kite to which point in order to advance the action. So the chapter is unnecessarily drawn out by trying it out and what should have been an emotional moment loses its strength.

Fortunately, it doesn't often happen that What Remains of Edith Finch gets in its way like that. The varied gameplay otherwise almost perfectly underlines the different personalities of the characters and make each story unique.

Horror game or not

None of the deaths is presented in a striking way. Rather, they are little tragedies that unfold before us while we can do no more than watch them and send the characters into their inevitable death. No matter what we do, Sam's hunting accident or Barbara's disappearance was decades ago. There is nothing we can do about it.