Edited on: November 16, 2025

Posted on: June 2, 2020

benoitsmith

Spiele: 1168 Rezensionen: 5

Flawed, Questionable, Overrated

One segment of "What Remains of Edith Finch" exemplifies best how at odds I am with the wide acclaim this game gets. A number of reviewers call that segment imaginative, emotional, a high point. As for me, I cannot help calling it inappropriate, insensitive, abysmal. Yes, I'm talking about "Gregory's Story". Gregory is one of the tragically-departed members of a seemingly cursed family. You play the game from their viewpoints as each one moves toward their doom, with a voice-over narration giving some perspective about it. The special thing about Gregory is that he's a baby, which makes his death all the more gruesome. However, the game makes matters worse with its baffling way of sweetening the horror: while the player is asked to make Gregory progress towards his inescapable fate in a playful way, the voice-over assumes that he's been spared from agony by his own imagination. I doubt I've ever seen such a misplaced, exploitative use of the cliché about that "fantasy world" innocent babies supposedly create for themselves. The so-called "sensitivity" about death and tragedy and loss displayed throughout the game appears here as an artificiality built upon questionable storytelling tricks. That is just the worst-advised segment of a game so plagued by clumsiness as a whole, I can hardly understand how it could have been received so well. As a walking simulator, it tries to stand out by switching viewpoints, and gameplays as well, since each victim's story has its own gameplay. The execution of such an intriguing principle turns out to be a letdown, yielding a mishmash of mini-games of uneven quality, where some really nice ideas (e.g. one where you have to play asynchronously with your left and right hand, in an ominous progression) meet some terrible choices, messy controls, ugly use of the first-person perspective. All in all, I find myself unable to rate this game higher than "mediocre", and adding its questionable narration draws it even lower in my opinion.

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Posted on: September 16, 2018

Ancalagonbahamut

Bestätigter Besitzer

Spiele: 378 Rezensionen: 11

Maybe just not for me. Walking simulator

There are many languages available, but you can't change it in game (bad choice for me). In the game installation folder there is an installation_setup.exe to set it. It is a walking simulator and a very short game. And the story didn't connected with me at all. (I cannot say really why to avoid spoilers) I think I was expecting something else. I wouln't recommend for people like me. (I played 2 chapters of life is strange and liked them)

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Posted on: April 15, 2018

kdgog

Bestätigter Besitzer

Spiele: Rezensionen: 67

Sadly frustrating

This is a game where you go along the only route and move the mouse when it lets you. As you do so it tells a fragmentary, incomplete and silly tale about a bunch of unlikable people and idiots whose misfortunes seem well-deserved. That's an awful description, but I felt like the game was being antagonistic whenever I loaded it, and struggling to the end was a chore. It started badly. I always check the game controls before playing - but they aren't listed. And you can't change them, so are stuck with what they set. And even those aren't made clear. So I had to hit random keys to find things like the zoom button, and - ridiculously - what I was unable to do. How do you run? How do you climb? How do you step into the edge of the pond? So right from the start I was struggling to even connect with basic things because the devs didn't put them in. The controls were also inconsistent. Sometimes you click on something, it opens - other times nothing happens until you move the mouse, or hold a button and move the mouse, and try and guess whether you move it by pushing up, down, left, right, rotating, clicking, whatever. It's kind of half-hearted and pointless physicality, aimed at making you think you are interacting. It's a system that works much better in older games like Penumbra. The story is melodramatic and silly. Someone was killed by monsters? Someone else lives in a room in a cellar for 30 years? An old woman builds rooms on top of the house? It was frustrating and confusing. Saves - you can't save when you want. Sometimes I quit the game in boredom, came back another day, and had to sit through the same cutscenes and voiceovers. NB: I liked Gone Home and Tacoma, but EF felt overblown and even more linear, with even less freedom. Another sin - you play a character, but the game purposefully hides what you're supposed to know. So left wondering WTF about stuff because you're left in the dark. That's not good storytelling, it is just frustrating.

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Posted on: July 21, 2019

holodoc1

Bestätigter Besitzer

Spiele: 62 Rezensionen: 2

Phantastisch!

Ich habe lange kein Spiel gespielt, nachdem ich eine solche Lust auf eine Rezension hatte. Ich muss dieses Spiel einfach nur loben, weil ich so scharf drauf war zu sehen, wie es allen Finches ergangen ist. Als erstes muss ich den Einfallsreichtum loben, wie die Macher des Spiels immer auf eine neue Art der Erzählweise gekommen sind oder besser eine neue Todesart und damit die geänderte spielerische Herangehensweise. Obwohl es manchmal recht makaber war, wie jemand umgekommen ist (zum Beispiel Baby Finch) ist es immer unterhaltsam geblieben. Vor allem hat das Spiel zum Nachdenken über das eigene Ich und die Möglichkeiten des Dahinscheidens veranlasst. Also, ich möchte hier nur zum Ausdruck bringen, wie sehr mir das Spiel gefallen hat. Ich kann die Finch-Story nur jedem weiter empfehlen. Hier macht ihr wirklich nichts falsch, wenn ihr es kauft - vor allem hier bei GOG - also DRM-frei! Ich hoffe, dass ich auch den paar deutschen Nutzern weiter geholfen habe, die wie ich der englischen Schreibsprache nicht (mehr) so mächtig sind. Ciao tschüss holodoc

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Posted on: August 28, 2022

FKAWMEWB

Bestätigter Besitzer

Spiele: 171 Rezensionen: 22

One of a kind

A young woman returns to an abandoned house trying to discover what happened to her family. Sound familiar? Finch sticks close to the genre convention of exploring a mostly linear environment and finding documents and objects to piece together a story. However, with the fate of each family member presented as a separate mostly interactive experience, the abandoned house, in itself a cool and quirky place rich with environmental narration, soon becomes a sort of overworld to a dozen highly varied minigames that take this above and beyond your typical walking sim. Of course, the magical realism of its narrative, with an ancient family curse and all, allows for flights of fancy, as well as shortcuts and omissions, that wouldn't be acceptable in more down-to-earth games like Gone Home (2013) or Firewatch (2017), so any direct comparison could hardly be fair. In a 2017 Gamespot interview, creative director Ian Dallas explained that they basically cobbled together prototypes that they felt captured the sublime beauty and intense emotion of characters facing their deaths (somewhat twisting his words here), so don't expect super nuanced characterisations or perfect verisimilitude. Still, while I did cry my eyes out first playing this in 2018, Finch neither wants nor needs your empathy. It's not about people per se, it's about the unique shiver you get from things coming to a close, the one thing that never fails to affirm the continuity of life going on. Each individual death in this game is a terrible tragedy, but seen through the medium of the story, there is a tragicomic gentleness to all this history. Story is what remains. "And Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth..." "And when you look at that house, at that history of imagination and stubbornness and madness, any of it seems possible." I know of no other game quite like this. If you enjoy narrative games at all, these are four hours you don't want to miss.

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