What Remains of Edith Finch
Jan. 19th, 2023 08:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingWhat Remains of Edith Finch
https://www.watchoutforfireballs.com/382
The guys from the Dark Souls podcast did an episode about What Remains of Edith Finch! The podcast episode is very good, so I sat down and replayed the game last night. It was just as weird and fun as I remembered.
One of the things I did this past summer after the "autistic freakshow" incident on Twitter was to delete a whole bunch of things online, including an entire blog where I used to post essays on video games from 2016 to 2018. I remember writing about What Remains of Edith Finch, and I was curious what my thoughts were when the game was first released in 2017. The writing is a little cringe to me now, but here's what I said...
What Remains of Edith Finch is a walking sim that takes about two hours to complete. It was released in April 2017 for the PlayStation 4, and oh my goodness it is gorgeous.
What Remains of Edith Finch falls into my favorite category of games: It was created for an adult audience by a small team of developers who take full advantage of the interactive gaming medium but don't frustrate the player with unnecessary puzzle or platforming elements. There's a lot to explore in this game, but the atmosphere is never broken by the player having to get up and check a walkthrough.
You play as a teenage woman named Edith Finch, who is returning to her family's house on a small island off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The house has been abandoned ever since Edith's mother moved away in order to escape "the family curse," which holds that everyone who is born into (or marries into) the Finch family dies in a tragic accident. In order to find closure, Edith tries to reconstruct the details of her family's deaths, which the player experiences though a series of vignettes that play out in the form of short stories.
Progression through the game is definitely on rails, but it doesn't feel particularly linear. Even though we know that each vignette will end in death, the player's interaction with the game is essential to the storytelling. I'm going to use the case of Edith's older brother Lewis as an example of what I mean.
Lewis is a young man who loves fantasy novels, video games, and weed. After he graduates from high school, he gets a job at a salmon cannery. This is just as dreary as you might expect, but Lewis daydreams while performing menial labor. As the player, you use one joystick to control the repetitive motion of decapitating fish and throwing them onto the conveyor belt while simultaneously using the other joystick to guide Lewis's avatar through his RPG-themed fantasies.
Lewis's daydream gradually becomes more interesting and complex. This is reflected by the game inside his mind being upgraded, almost as though it were being remastered across various eras of game consoles. The controls for the salmon cannery aspect of Lewis's life never change, and they remain a constant annoyance as the fantasy slowly expands to fill the screen. When the player is jolted out of this daydream back into the bloody and poorly lit factory, it's much more jarring than it would be if we were simply reading or watching Lewis's story.
The psychiatrist who narrates this vignette says that Lewis's death was caused by a hallucination triggered by withdrawal from hard drugs, but the player understands that it was suicide brought about by his overwhelming desire to no longer be anchored by an unpleasant and unsatisfying reality. This episode is only twenty minutes long, but I cried. Kind of a lot actually.
What Remains of Edith Finch isn't sad or sentimental; rather, it's nuanced and incredibly beautiful. It doesn't give the player the same sort of transcendent experience as a more ambitious game like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, but its smaller and more personal stories are replete with mystery and wonder. Although the two games were made by different developers, What Remains of Edith Finch feels like a spiritual sequel to Gone Home, and it's such a pleasure to see the gaming medium used to apply magical realism to gothic dramas of family ghosts and personal journeys of discovery.
Reflecting on What Remains of Edith Finch five years later, I would say exactly what the Dark Souls podcast guys said: I'm afraid that the Wes Anderson style of twee humor might not land the same way in a social media hellscape where people build clout by declaiming that such-and-such piece of progressive media is "insensitive" or "in poor taste." What Remains of Edith Finch is a game that treats the twinned subjects of death and mental illness in a way that celebrates the joys of being alive, and I'm not sure that particular multilayered tone would necessarily survive the black-or-white mentality of Twitter.
Still, I love this game, and I appreciate it even more now that I've had more personal experience with grief. I wouldn't go as far as to say that What Remains of Edith Finch is uplifting, but being able to experience a work of art like this totally improved my mood and reignited my creative motivation.
https://www.watchoutforfireballs.com/382
The guys from the Dark Souls podcast did an episode about What Remains of Edith Finch! The podcast episode is very good, so I sat down and replayed the game last night. It was just as weird and fun as I remembered.
One of the things I did this past summer after the "autistic freakshow" incident on Twitter was to delete a whole bunch of things online, including an entire blog where I used to post essays on video games from 2016 to 2018. I remember writing about What Remains of Edith Finch, and I was curious what my thoughts were when the game was first released in 2017. The writing is a little cringe to me now, but here's what I said...
What Remains of Edith Finch is a walking sim that takes about two hours to complete. It was released in April 2017 for the PlayStation 4, and oh my goodness it is gorgeous.
What Remains of Edith Finch falls into my favorite category of games: It was created for an adult audience by a small team of developers who take full advantage of the interactive gaming medium but don't frustrate the player with unnecessary puzzle or platforming elements. There's a lot to explore in this game, but the atmosphere is never broken by the player having to get up and check a walkthrough.
You play as a teenage woman named Edith Finch, who is returning to her family's house on a small island off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The house has been abandoned ever since Edith's mother moved away in order to escape "the family curse," which holds that everyone who is born into (or marries into) the Finch family dies in a tragic accident. In order to find closure, Edith tries to reconstruct the details of her family's deaths, which the player experiences though a series of vignettes that play out in the form of short stories.
Progression through the game is definitely on rails, but it doesn't feel particularly linear. Even though we know that each vignette will end in death, the player's interaction with the game is essential to the storytelling. I'm going to use the case of Edith's older brother Lewis as an example of what I mean.
Lewis is a young man who loves fantasy novels, video games, and weed. After he graduates from high school, he gets a job at a salmon cannery. This is just as dreary as you might expect, but Lewis daydreams while performing menial labor. As the player, you use one joystick to control the repetitive motion of decapitating fish and throwing them onto the conveyor belt while simultaneously using the other joystick to guide Lewis's avatar through his RPG-themed fantasies.
Lewis's daydream gradually becomes more interesting and complex. This is reflected by the game inside his mind being upgraded, almost as though it were being remastered across various eras of game consoles. The controls for the salmon cannery aspect of Lewis's life never change, and they remain a constant annoyance as the fantasy slowly expands to fill the screen. When the player is jolted out of this daydream back into the bloody and poorly lit factory, it's much more jarring than it would be if we were simply reading or watching Lewis's story.
The psychiatrist who narrates this vignette says that Lewis's death was caused by a hallucination triggered by withdrawal from hard drugs, but the player understands that it was suicide brought about by his overwhelming desire to no longer be anchored by an unpleasant and unsatisfying reality. This episode is only twenty minutes long, but I cried. Kind of a lot actually.
What Remains of Edith Finch isn't sad or sentimental; rather, it's nuanced and incredibly beautiful. It doesn't give the player the same sort of transcendent experience as a more ambitious game like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, but its smaller and more personal stories are replete with mystery and wonder. Although the two games were made by different developers, What Remains of Edith Finch feels like a spiritual sequel to Gone Home, and it's such a pleasure to see the gaming medium used to apply magical realism to gothic dramas of family ghosts and personal journeys of discovery.
Reflecting on What Remains of Edith Finch five years later, I would say exactly what the Dark Souls podcast guys said: I'm afraid that the Wes Anderson style of twee humor might not land the same way in a social media hellscape where people build clout by declaiming that such-and-such piece of progressive media is "insensitive" or "in poor taste." What Remains of Edith Finch is a game that treats the twinned subjects of death and mental illness in a way that celebrates the joys of being alive, and I'm not sure that particular multilayered tone would necessarily survive the black-or-white mentality of Twitter.
Still, I love this game, and I appreciate it even more now that I've had more personal experience with grief. I wouldn't go as far as to say that What Remains of Edith Finch is uplifting, but being able to experience a work of art like this totally improved my mood and reignited my creative motivation.
