Free game: What Remains of Edith Finch

What Remains of Edith Finch is free this month from the Epic store. I downloaded it last night and couldn't stop playing until I was done. It's a detailed, polished walking simulator that clocks in at 3 hours, so tightly orchestrated it feels like a genuinely interactive movie.

It centers on Edith, a high schooler and the last surviving child of a family "cursed" by generations of tragedy. After her mother's death, she inherits the family's cosy yet unsettling manse and sets out to uncover the family secrets. This is to say, she wants to know why so many Finches died young and why her mother didn't want the stories told.

It's obviously from the outset that something is deeply wrong with the family and that the wrongness hovers at the margins of reason. It's reflected in the house, mundane at the ground level but an increasingly alarming mass of ramshackle additions up top. Surely that would be dangerous, you ask yourself.

Some of the family death vignettes really got under my skin. They're all elaborated in the telling to the point of magic realism and beyond, but when you sit and think about what was shown they unravel to mundane parenting failures, one after another after another. But now I'm in danger of spoiling this game's secrets.

Edith Finch maintains a tension between gothic mystery and the suggestion of a damaged family that mythologizes its subtly self-destructive currents. But it does such a good job of this that the ending can't quite close the balance, opting instead for an too-easy way out. Read the rest