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I waffled quite a bit on where I was going to place this game. Though bits of the storytelling were fantastic, so many of the things that bother me about walking simulators were on full display. Then the game ended and I realized that What Remains of Edith Finch falls squarely into the “pretentious hints at something actually interesting, then an ending that resolves nothing” – similar to Old Gods Rising – but less insulting and with some interesting ideas – or NUTS, but with fewer mechanics.
In Edith Finch, you are the inheritor of an old mansion on Orcas Island as the sole survivor of the Finch family. You return to your childhood home to discover all the stories about your relatives who died too early (thirteen in all).
Let’s start with the good: it has an explanation for your ponderous walking speed (though the game doesn’t tell you until about 3/4 of the way through the game, it’s obvious if you know where to look), Lewis’ story is well-told and uses game mechanics to good effect, the house you explore has several rooms with great verisimilitude, and the Pacific Northwest setting isn’t too far off from reality. Sadly, that’s about it for the good. The rest of this review is just going to be me complaining, so skip to the end if you just want my bottom line.
First, though there is an explanation for the slow walking speed, it’s still a slow walking speed (and only some of the stories you explore fix it). At multiple times in my two hour playthrough, I was in agony as I just wanted to cross the room in under 30 seconds. Still, the house is compact enough that I was able to stick with it, and the stories themselves are well-constructed enough to have kept my interest.
The bigger issue is two-fold: there’s precious little reason (other than in Lewis’ story, as I mentioned) for this to be a game, and there’s no real conclusion or climax or lesson (other than “people die”) – the game just…ends. As with many games that attempt this “isn’t the world mysterious” faux magical realism kind of thing, each story you explore hints at some supernatural force but are all explained with quite mundane means. A repeated message is that “knowing the stories leads the Finches to die” – but we are never actually given evidence for that. None of the people that died (other than perhaps Calvin) really died in a way that was their fault.
There’s a legend about the Finch family being cursed, but each death is mundane despite the initial supernatural implications. The trouble is: what if I want there to be a curse? What if I want Milton to have stepped into a world he painted for himself? What if I want Molly to have been eaten by a monster instead of poisoned by fluoride toothpaste? What if I want Barbara to have died the way described in the graphic novel (writing a Halloween-themed graphic novel about a person’s death is, by the way, immersion-breakingly bad taste, regardless of the inventiveness of the idea) instead of killed by her abusive boyfriend? Magical realism is only magical realism if, you know, there’s magic.
Some general complaints: voiced lines will often rob you of camera control for a moment to make you look at text that appears – Half Life 2 understood how important keeping control of your character was in 2004. Several of the stories have truly awful controls. Opening doors and windows often requires you to move your mouse (or control stick, as I guess was the intention) for no reason other than to make you feel like you had input. Getting it to work with ultrawide resolutions required some hacking that shouldn’t be necessary these days. I’ve never opened up a game and immediately disliked the aesthetic, but there’s something… off… about the look of trees in the game (I initially thought my graphics settings were set to low or something).
That above line is the closest we get to a conclusion. But understand things? What things? Why would we need to live forever to understand them? Why did I spend two hours exploring a house where reusing rooms is forbidden, building safety codes were never passed into law, and antidepressants aren’t prescribed to people with blaring klaxons for depression? Even if I lived forever, I don’t think I would understand why this game has a 95% rating on Steam. Tier Three, though I can’t say I don’t recommend it if you can get it very cheaply.