What comes to your mind when you think of family? Perhaps something along the lines of memories, nostalgia, love, connection, and even emotional support. For many, the idea of a family may have much to do with trauma, tough times, and unsolved mysteries.
Think of these things and hold that thought. Next, imagine if you could personally revisit every family member’s state of consciousness as they experienced the last few moments of their life.
What Remains of Edith Finch is an adventure that dives into many such emotional aspects. You play as Edith, who investigates her family history and tries to determine why she is the last living member of her family. Through her perspective, you tour the enormous Finch estate looking for tales, exploring stories that span periods from the past. These tales allow you to experience the life of a new family member on the day of their passing.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a tale of many souls
Creative practitioners such as game designers and artists often struggle with the idea of out-of-body experiences. How can they, as innovators, create experiences that people can relate to without having lived those experiences in the first place? As a creative studio, Annapurna Interactive has a reputation for making games that stand outside the box, taking their own philosophical shapes and forms. What Remains of Edith Finch is no different.
Through much of the game, you journey across the Finch estate trying to piece together the riddled stories of your family’s past. Many who played the game called it a ‘walking simulator’, which at the time made sense since that’s what you do – walk through mysterious spaces and solve puzzles.
What Remains of Edith Finch’s beautifully crafted stories let you experience a character from the past in their final moments. Sometimes, you play as a cat. Another time, as a baby! This little shift in perspective gives you a glimpse of what it felt like being in someone else’s shoes and soul.
The game excels at curating these stories in such a way that everything feels like an interwoven connection of memories. As if, in a way, these stories were speaking to each other. And, in these moments of untimely death, you cling to their final thoughts surrounding fear, doubt, anxiety, love, longing, and escapism.
Moving through the narrative
As a piece of interactive storytelling, What Remains of Edith Finch offers its players a speculative journey through many of the world’s eerily daunting physical spaces. The game inspires simple movements, camera, and puzzle-solving mechanics that spark awe and wonder.
The worldbuilding and mood of the journey are incredible, and every little aspect is well-considered. For instance, when the players walk inside the kitchen, they discover stacks of unclean dishes and old cartons of Chinese takeaway that have been left on the counter. Each room is distinctive, expressing the personality and interests of each Finch through its sense of aesthetics.
With each puzzle the player solves and every story they find closure to, What Remains of Edith Finch teaches a worthy lesson about life and death. Death isn’t the ending to the player’s discoveries; it’s merely something that happened in the life of Finches before her.
Despite their tragic endings, their stories are charming. What Remains of Edith Finch is unquestionably a love story about a family and the curse they parted ways with.
An inspiration for interactive stories being written
Interactive storytelling has long been a medium for creative professionals in the industry. However, few manage to pull it off in a way that stays in the psyches of people after they’ve completed the protagonist’s journey. Studios like Telltale Games (developers of The Walking Dead) and Quantic Dream (developers of Detroit: Become Human) manage to harness this craft. It won’t be a surprise to see more developers taking up interactive storytelling as a subgenre for their games.
To create a masterpiece like What Remains of Edith Finch, developers need to stay open-minded to experiments that don’t stray away from difficult emotions and storytelling that harnesses resilience in the player’s mind.
Interactive storytelling can offer a personal experience in addition to happy and sad stories by letting players explore subjects and concepts that are pertinent to their own emotional journeys. Well-crafted experiences like What Remains of Edith Finch have the ability to completely change how we tell tales and interact with audiences, and their significance is only going to increase over time.
