What Remains of Edith Finch Developer

Patrick Healy | 1 Name: What Remains of Edith Finch Developer: Giant Sparrow Publisher: Annapurna Interactive Platform: PS4, Xbox One, and Windows Released in 2017 Interactive Fiction Without Interactive Fiction What Remains of Edith Finch is a first-person adventure game containing an anthology of action games. You play as Edith Finch returning to the Finch residence for the first time in almost six years. The family is haunted by a curse that kills everyone prematurely; you are the last surviving Finch, only 17 years old. The house is full of rooms transformed into monuments to every dead leaf and branch of your family tree; following the death of each room’s resident, Great-Grandma Edie filled their space with an elaborate shrine, somehow incorporating how they died, usually complete with some personal account of the tragedy. You traverse this museum and individually inspect every monument, launching into unique mini-game segments where you re-enact the last moments of their lives, usually through allegorical imagery. In one segment you’ll inhabit a child attempting to swing a rope swing a full 360 degrees only to fall off the swing and plummet to his death off a cliff in front of him; in another, you’ll play as a hermit leaving his bunker for the first time in years, only to die getting hit by a train. The premise is dark but the game itself is incredibly whimsical. Even when experiencing the death of a toddler, we’re embraced by a warm orchestra and bright dancing bath toys; a suicide is decorated with the glitz of a palace. The house itself is at once a monstrosity, with added structures for new living space precariously tacked on to its side as to not disturb the graves of the past generations, and a beautiful gallery, with the narratives that shaped familial death on display. When Edith finishes her journey, she sits at her bed and writes all of these stories out in a journal so that a new generation of Finch may remember them. As we learn close to the end of the game, Edith is pregnant. Flashing many years forward to the game’s epilogue, Edith has passed away and her son returns to the house, her journal in hand, to place flowers on her grave. What Remains of Edith Finch is, broadly, a game about storytelling. At one level, it’s about how their family members’ lives shape the stories they tell and, more importantly, how those stories shape their lives; at another, it’s about the medium of games as a platform for storytelling. What the story tells us The game’s narrative is in conflict over one question; should the Finches share their stories of tragic death? At one end of this debate we have Dawn, Edith’s mother, who seals the rooms of the house off to protect her children from the stories; at the other, we have Great- Patrick Healy | 2 Grandma Edie, who built the monuments in the first place and has since drilled peepholes in the doors Dawn sealed. Edie is excited by the magic of the curse. Even when her own husband tragically dies while building a dragon-themed slide, she tells the story as if he were killed fighting an actual dragon. There’s a lot of comfort in the stories, but her fixation is to the point of obsession; the narrative implies she reaches out to a comic book writer to make a book about her own daughter’s death; she does an interview with a tabloid about a mole-man living under her house, which is revealed to actually be her son Walter, living in a bunker, traumatized by having witnessed the death of his sister, whom the comic book was written about. She cares more about the stories than the lives of her family members. Dawn resists the stories, leaving the house behind when she grows into adulthood, moving around the world for her work and eventually settling down with a man she meets in India: Sanjay, Edith’s father. It’s only after Sanjay’s death that they return to Edie’s house, perhaps returning for the comfort of the stories or maybe just because it’s what made sense in the face of tragedy. Dawn blames her mother’s stories for the deaths of her two sons, and this blame is reasonable; she lost both of her sons to their imaginations, attempting to recreate the fantastical stories they grew up with within their own lives. Milton disappears, having apparently been sucked into the world of his own creative work; Lewis’ suicide was an attempt to escape the ‘real’ world and move into a more beautiful world he had daydreamed. In our ludic interactions with the individual death stories, we only ever experience the good side of these stories: the most idealized versions. From the beginning, with Molly’s surreal story of becoming a sea monster and eventually having that monster consume her human body, we are far from experiencing objective reality. In reality, Molly likely died by poisoning herself; a ten-year-old girl poisoned herself with toxic berries and a full tube of toothpaste all because her mother, Edie, sent her to sleep without food and locked her door from the outside. We only ever play from Edie’s perspective on the stories; these stories are magic that rewrites history and makes us comfortable. Even Dawn comes around to the comfort of stories. On her death bed, she gives Edith the key to the first room, allowing her to move past the boarded-up doors and access the monuments that fill Edie’s house. She would never give Edith this key if she truly wanted the stories to die with her; Dawn wants the magic of their family mythology. As Edith writes these stories in her journal, she questions whether she should really be writing all of this down, struggling with the same conflict she witnessed between her mother and great-grandmother. After all, if she doesn’t tell her child about the “curse”, couldn’t it die with her? Ultimately, she comes to the same conclusion as Dawn; their stories need to be told: perhaps even only for self-preservation. What remains of Edith Finch is only, really, her stories1. 1 Roll credits… Patrick Healy | 3 Walking Simulator? These types of games are typically referred to as ‘walking simulators’; it’s clearly a pejorative term meant to mock the premise of having a first-person game that doesn’t include a gun but it’s since been adopted by enthusiasts of the sub-genre. What Remains of Edith Finch is definitely about death but it isn’t about violence, or at least it doesn’t adopt violence into its ludic vernacular, and regardless of whether one thinks that makes it a ‘bad’ game or even not a game at all, we can all agree that that makes it different than most first-person games, worthy of placement in this sub-genre. Many critics, notably Ian Bogost, have labeled ‘Walking Simulators’ as a “transitional form”, claiming What Remains of Edith Finch represents where the genre was going2. I find this insight particularly foolish. Sure, What Remains of Edith Finch is clearly later in a genealogy of these sorts of games, deeply linked to Gone Home; Edith, of course, also begins the game by returning home, but to recognize Gone Home as a kind of game only means to the end that is What Remains of Edith Finch fundamentally misunderstands the kind of game Gone Home is. What Remains of Edith Finch is a much different game than Gone Home but it is not unquestionably better. Gone Home did not remove agency from the player, nor is it a game “without gameplay”. As I’ve already discussed, Gone Home is a game that presents us with a playground made of a family’s object ecology3; it is this ecology, and by extension the family itself, that we, as players, willfully take apart and put back together, analyze and synthesize. The action of Gone Home is no doubt less pronounced than that of What Remains of Edith Finch, but the choices underlying are perhaps more plentiful in Gone Home, regardless; both games have the pseudo-analog near-infinite agency inherent to exploring a 3D environment, but only Gone Home allows you to interact with these objects, while What Remains of Edith Finch only linearly guides the player through narratives, with an almost entirely static environment in between, closer to Disneyland’s Peter Pan’s Flight than Bioshock’s Minerva’s Den. Bogost is right that the supposed target of What Remains of Edith Finch’s analysis is narrative itself, but I’m skeptical that the game allows any ludic engagement with this analysis. It’s a game made out of storytelling, giving us distinct playgrounds to explore its modes. Ironically, though, this analysis leads us only to shallow conclusions in the central theme; if we are to understand half of the kind of art this is, we must push ourselves out of the guided experience and look at it as an interactive fiction text. 2 Ian Bogost made this claim in a piece for The Atlantic called “Video Games Are Better Without Stories”, which this paper is largely a response to and reflection on. You can read it here (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/). 3 I mean that I’ve discussed this in a previous paper, not previously in this paper. Patrick Healy | 4 What we say Upon further analysis, there is something much more nefarious going on in the narratives of What Remains of Edith Finch.

Load more