This game touched me deeply. There are only a few games that I have played over the many years which leave me changed as a person in some way, and What Remains of Edith Finch is one of them. This experience will haunt me for a long time and it will take me a while before I'm able to explore it again.
If you think of yourself as an experienced, connoisseur of gaming and you don't already own this game, then you simply must. I could praise the game mechanics alone for hours, let alone the artwork, the story and the voice actors. Every single thing in this game is absolutely beautiful and perfect, my only wish would be that it never ended.
It's a walking simulator. It's a pretty good one, but nothing more.
It has a nice story, great environment, good music, decent minigames, but absolutely zero gameplay apart from 'walk forward and interact with things'.
I think it would make a decent book or movie, but I struggle to find how being an interactive media is a right thing for it.
What Remains of Edith Finch is staggeringly ambitious - a sprawling narrative featuring over a dozen characters and as many different gameplay mechanics, beautifully presented and squeezed into an interactive fiction experience lasting just a couple of hours. Whether or not the player ultimately thinks the story succeeds, there's no denying that it represents another big push forward for a genre where some of the most innovative storytelling experiences in gaming are currently being made.
Although presenting itself as a walking simulator with strong reminders of Gone Home or Ethan Carter (there are early visual cues of a lonely house set in a forested Pacific north-west landscape) Edith Finch soon reveals itself to have incredible depth all of its own. The house is not only full of artifacts but also living testimonies of the game's characters – interactive sections revolving around the circumstances of their deaths. Each of these stories comes complete with its own gameplay mechanic; some of which are truly wonderous. Molly and Lewis' vignettes, in particular, are extraordinary. And they’re powerful, too. I found Gregory's vignette so challenging that I wanted to stop playing just to avoid the inevitability of what was happening.
Does the whole experience hold together as well as individual vignettes? For me, not quite. There's a problem at the core of the story: Edith's own vignette is a crushing disappointment. Without spoiling: it relies on a tired storytelling cliché which undermines the narrative's attempt to paint ideas of death, memory and storytelling in new colours. Ultimately, Gone Home and Firewatch present more satisfying total narratives because their gameplay is completely melded to their story. But even though the whole is not as satisfying as its individual parts, Edith Finch is still a stunning achievement. Like Tacoma, it’s interactive fiction which is truly focused on making the actions of the player feel important and consequential.
