What Remains of Edith Finch

A very well told story and I like how you got to experience the different characters. There is a lot of details to look at when wander around which is very well done. The atmosphere where it all is played out is very fitting and good. It is a very a short game and I got it on a sale and found it to be worth it.

Be warned, this is a barely interactive 3D graphics movie and you'll finish it in one sitting (it's about 2 hours long). Essentially, you follow one single path throughout the house and once you reach a story trigger you get locked into a cutscene where you press prompts to see stuff happen. The story is not very coherent, but if you like mysterious for the sake of mysterious, then give it a try.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a brief but intriguing exploration of the possibilities of interactive fiction as a storytelling medium. Calling it a game is mostly a courtesy. There are no puzzles to solve and no choices to make that affect the outcome. There is no objective beyond witnessing, quite literally first-hand, the mysterious, bizarre, and sometimes tragic deaths of four generations of the eccentric Finch family as you guide Edith through the family home. However, What Remains of Edith Finch delivers on what it aspires to be, and in that context the accolades are understandable. I did find the lack of freedom disappointing. The game presents a visually intriguing environment, then prevents us from interacting with the vast majority of it. Of course, any game only allows you to do what it wants you to, but in this one that's so little that it felt claustrophobic at times. Among the highlights for me were the house's amazing visual detail and the use of a variety of mechanics to present the family vignettes. The latter is like a brainstorm session realized. None of these mechanics are very deep, but they are presented in a way that almost challenges other interactive storytellers to build upon them. The marriage of story and setting is superb, and together they come across as curiously believable despite being outrageous. In this respect, the vignettes are almost metaphors for the game itself -- the things we believe can be real to us whether they make sense or not -- and perhaps that's even intentional. What many gamers will struggle with is the need for what happened to make sense. There's no mystery to solve, although it feels throughout like there should be one. There's no great revelation that explains why the events we got to experience happened. And that's actually fine. Sometimes letting the audience figure out what they want to make of it all is more meaningful than telling them what really did happen (see David Lynch movies).

The story is really interesting, the setting is beautiful, the writing and voice acting are both a solid 10.

When researching this game before I bought it, I kept hearing that it was an "emotional" experience. As a result, in all honesty I may have built up my expectations too high for this game. While there definitely were emotional moments, I kept expecting to be brought to tears throughout the game, which never happened (there was one story that really got to me, but even then I never got teary-eyed). Instead, what I felt throughout the game was a sense of melancholy and sympathy for these characters - which to be fair, the game was REALLY good at conveying. I guess the game just never managed to personally connect with me: it was more like hearing a sad story being told to you second-hand. One thing that did get in the way of my suspension of disbelief - and therefore might've affected my emotional investment in the game - was that I never believed this house could be a real place. It felt more like a funhouse that was very obviously built to be a video game environment (unlike a game such as Gone Home, for example, which to me seemed much more believable as a real house that people would live in). Still, I support developers like these who try to do something different from your standard shooty video game.