What Remains of Edith Finch is one of the best magical realist stories in all of video games, alongside Kentucky Route Zero. A first-person story-based experience similar to Gone Home and Firewatch, it tells the incredibly tragic and always surprising tale of the Finch family across several generations. As you explore the beautiful, labyrinthine house, you’ll trace the history of each family member, uncovering the truth behind a possible family curse and ultimately learning how each person succumbed to it. Developer Giant Sparrow (known for The Unfinished Swan) have once again created something truly special.

The two hours it took to thoroughly explore the house, especially the first time I approached it, left me with a range of emotions from utter exhaustion to invigoration to anger at the noticeable drop in performance. The only challenge is finding a way into each locked room in the house, usually with secret passageways, giving the whole thing a pop-up storybook charm and fantasy. As you explore the house, Edith, the last surviving member of the Finch family, tells you the story of how her home, her family, and her amazing life came to an untimely end. There are few friction points that impede progress throughout
(even fewer puzzles than the aforementioned Gone Home), but the fun of Edith Finch comes in its final moments, when you are completely immersed in each of the Finch’s lives. Once you find a specific memento in each of her rooms, you’ll experience the story of her death told through a fantastical fable. Each one is presented through a completely different gameplay experience, which always subverted my expectations. Either way, nothing is for sure when it comes to art style, perspective, or genre of game. I don’t want to give anything away because I had so much fun not knowing where the next memory would take me. With the exception of one strange sequence where you control an animal from a first-person perspective, there’s something dreamlike about the way these sequences not only bend the rules but defy them entirely.

Although each story is ultimately about death, it’s wonderful how each story is so full of life. Even heartbreaking events like the death of a child are expressed with an exuberance of creativity and magic. While experiencing the final moments of their lives is undoubtedly tragic, their way of accepting it and welcoming what comes next fills each story with light. The eccentric family itself reminded me of the Tenenbaums from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, as well as the Glass family that appears in various works by J.D. Salinger. Learning how they all related to one another and how the various deaths affected each surviving member is something I won’t soon forget.

What I really like about the house itself is that it feels incredibly lived-in. It doesn’t look like a set designed with video game-level ideas in mind, but more like a home inhabited by a dozen members of an incredibly creative family for several generations. In some cases, interactivity is sacrificed; there is very little in the house that you can actually touch or interact with. Just like in a museum, the “look but don’t touch” rule applies here too. But to be honest, I didn’t mind that, because I had so much fun carefully looking at every nook and cranny of the world’s beautiful details.

Verdict

Though it took just under two hours to play, I resumed “What Remains of Edith Finch” as soon as the credits rolled. Each vignette is so unique and surprising that I didn’t have enough time to absorb and analyze what I’d just played before moving on to the next. But after fully piecing together the family threads and sifting through the allegory of their final moments, I was left with a beautiful, heartbreaking mosaic that shines with life even in the midst of suffering.