[h1]What Remains of Edith Finch[/h1]
[i]A house of sealed bedrooms, and the last Finch left to open them.[/i]
[b]First-person narrative exploration | ~2 hours[/b]
[h2]What it's about[/h2]
Edith Finch, seventeen and the last of her family, returns to the enormous, half-collapsed house her relatives built on the Washington coast. Every Finch who died there had their bedroom sealed exactly as they left it, and Edith comes back with a key and a notebook to find out what happened to all of them.
Each room you open becomes a story. You step out of the house and into that relative's last day, played from the inside. The deaths aren't the twist; the family has assumed for generations that it's cursed, and what the game is really asking is what a family does with a belief like that, and what it hands down to the children who inherit it.
Mechanically it barely holds still. You walk, you open things, and you follow whatever each vignette puts in your hands, and nearly every one invents its own controls and its own look. No combat, no puzzles to speak of, no way to fail.
[h2]What it does well[/h2]
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[*][b]Invention, story after story.[/b] Each vignette is built from scratch, with its own art style, its own perspective and its own way of being played. A dozen small games sit inside this one, and the game keeps changing shape every ten minutes rather than settling into a format.
[*][b]The house is the best character in it.[/b] Built outward and upward by each generation in turn, stuffed with crawlspaces, peepholes and bedrooms preserved as shrines, it tells you more about the Finches through its objects and its architecture than any of the dialogue does.
[*][b]One late sequence justifies the whole medium.[/b] One story in the back half does something with its controls that no film or novel could copy, because the point isn't what you're watching, it's what your own hands are doing while you watch. Whatever else fades, that one stays.
[*][b]Text that lives in the world.[/b] The narration is printed into the scenes themselves, drifting across railings and water and walls as you move. It's an elegant solution that keeps you looking at the world instead of at subtitles.
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[h2]What holds it back[/h2]
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[*][b]It's sad without relief.[/b] Every room ends the same way, and there's very little warmth, humour or hope to carry between them. Two hours of unbroken loss doesn't build to grief so much as flatten into numbness, which makes the game easy to admire and hard to enjoy.
[*][b]You're rarely doing much.[/b] Most of the interaction is ceremonial: hold a direction, turn a crank, keep a motion going. Where the idea behind a vignette is strong that's enough, but when it isn't you notice you're mostly pressing forward through someone else's scene.
[*][b]The vignettes are uneven.[/b] The best of them are among the finest short stories games have produced. Others introduce a person, an idea and an ending inside three minutes, too fast for any of it to land, and they blur together afterwards.
[*][b]The frame is thinner than what it holds.[/b] Edith herself, and the curse the family believes in, get atmosphere rather than substance. The connective tissue between the stories is noticeably weaker than the stories, so the game ends up a collection rather than a whole.
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[h2]Summary[/h2]
What Remains of Edith Finch is a remarkable piece of craft that's easier to admire than to love. Its best vignettes do things nothing else does, and the house they sit in is beautifully built, but the framing story is thin and the tone never lifts across the whole two hours. If you want to see how far games can push short-form storytelling, it's essential viewing. If you're looking for somewhere to spend time rather than something to pass through, it may leave you cold.
[b]Extraordinary in pieces, heavy as a whole. Worth playing once, if you know what you're walking into.[/b]
