5/5 ★ – Masterworks_All's review of What Remains of Edith Finch.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a collection of short stories turned into a game. This may make Edith Finch seem like another unengaging "walking simulator" - that new genre of game that strips all interactivity away, leaving players with little more than narration or disconnected text. But what elevates Edith Finch is how it marries its gameplay to its narrative - this isn't a story that would work better as a book or a movie, its greatest moments are entirely dependent on its interactivity. It's that rare narrative-driven game that actually makes use of the medium to tell its story. Edith Finch shows a love of magical realism, with countless books scattered throughout the rooms of the house. But what the game reminded me most of was the 2017 film, A Ghost Story. The film is a simple story - a man dies, and his ghost finds it impossible to move on, lingering in his house long after it ceases to be a home. The film is concerned with legacy, what it means to move on, what constitutes a home beyond the physical structure, life and death. Edith Finch felt to me like something of an inversion of A Ghost Story. Rather than a ghost observing life going on without him, Edith Finch is about a living woman - the titular character, the elder Edith Finch, nicknamed Edie - building a monument to death. Edie is a fascinating character - at once she's tragic, funny, sympathetic, and villainous. Remembered fondly by the game's narrator, Edie's influence casts a poisonous shadow across her family and the game's narrative. Edith Finch is a ghost story set in a haunted house. While there might be a cemetery outside the grounds of the house, it's the house itself that's the real graveyard. Entire rooms are sealed off for each dead family member, with peepholes drilled in the doors to ensure the living are never too far from the dead. Edie has made her home a monument to death, with each dead family member having their own preserved shrine and death portrait painted by Edie. There aren't any literal ghosts, but the presence of each lost family member lingers, haunting those who remain. This is the way in which Edith Finch uses gameplay to elevate its narrative. You don't just hear or read about the lost family members - you become them, living out their final moments before death, forging a far stronger impression. In this way they become a very real presence in the game, and it feels as though they're still in the house with you, they never left. One can imagine what it must have felt like to grow up in a home like this, less a house than it is a mausoleum in which every family member is destined to be entombed. Edie believes in a family curse, that every family member is doomed to die tragically. This curse became an obsession for Edie - the deaths of her family are more important than their actual lives, their death is their legacy, the only thing they leave behind. Nowhere in the game is this more explicit than with her twin grandchildren. Calvin dies aged 11, and Sam lives in their shared room for another 8 years, with Edie 'roping off' Calvin's side of the room. A shrine for a dead child is more important than a simple bedroom for a living child. Edie insists that these stories of death and curses are important, that the younger Edith has a right to know them. Edith's mother, Dawn, believes the stories themselves are responsible for all of the tragic deaths. Edith ponders this idea herself, wondering if a belief in the family curse is what creates the curse, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Walter talks of how anything, no matter how painful or scary, can become normal given enough time, that it can even become friendly. For Edie, death, and the curse, has become a friend to be embraced and honoured. Perhaps this is driven by the overwhelming grief from the death of her children, maybe the mysticism of a curse and believing in something grander is just easier than accepting death as pointless and cruel. Whatever her reasons, Edie's twisted relationship to death - and subsequently life - drives the numerous tragedies throughout the game far more than any curse. Edie doesn't fear the curse, she glorifies it, it's something that makes the family 'special', and so it must be honoured. Edie proudly proclaims the family legacy of death - giving interviews about her traumatised son living under the house, telling the pulpy magazine intimate details about Barbara's death. Even in her own bedroom, Edie has a shrine to the death of her husband - and it is a shrine to his death, not his life, even featuring a photograph of him falling to his death. This mindset, this belief in a curse and obsession with death, seems to be what really curses the family. It's notable that so many of the deaths in the game seem to be a result of neglect or carelessness. Molly is locked in her room without food, Gregory is left alone in the bath, Calvin's swing is built on the edge of a cliff. These are senseless accidents and mistakes. Wouldn't it be so much more attractive, more meaningful, to imagine a grand curse at play rather than simple human error? The power of Edie's influence is obvious, as every family member seems to embrace her belief in the curse in some way. Walter hides under the house from death and monsters for decades, facilitated by Edie who makes no effort to get her son the help he needs. Molly, a 10 year old girl, believes her death is inevitable, and she reacts with little fear. Sam believes his brother Calvin had decided to fly, that there was nothing that anyone could have done to save him, and this should be celebrated as beautiful. Lewis' death most forcefully evokes Edie's celebration of death by turning it into a literal celebration, as Lewis imagines cheering crowds and blasting music, before bowing his head to die. Lewis, finding no meaning in his life, fully embraced Edie's beliefs, and found meaning in his death instead. The younger Edith herself, despite her mother's best efforts, and despite her own instincts, has fallen into the same web of her great-grandmother's influence that ensnared the rest of her family. In choosing to leave her son a book of stories detailing the family deaths - in effect, a version of the game itself - Edith seems to have created a memorial to death much like Edie did through the house. Edith leaves behind a legacy of death to her son, and he's drawn to that graveyard of a house just as the player was. Edith sounds hopeful, but it's a tragic ending, a celebration of death, not life. And here again the game's mechanics elevate the narrative, because the player is made complicit in Edie's mindset. We inhabit near-every family member's final moments, experiencing their death through gameplay. We see very little of their actual lives, only their death. We come to know these characters only through the lens of how they died - often tragically young. As Edie so forcefully believes, their deaths are their legacies, and this is communicated not just by the narrative, but with the gameplay. Edie hasn't just warped her family's perception, she's warped the player's too. This is what narrative-driven games should strive to achieve - narrative and gameplay complementing one another to achieve something greater, something uniquely informed by the medium. What Remains of Edith Finch is an intimate exploration of how we process death, and how one powerful family member can shape and warp an entire family's reality for generations. It's a compelling narrative that has stayed with me long after playing. More than that, it's a narrative that draws on the unique strengths of the medium to tell stories in a way that few other games ever have. There are certainly better stories in games out there, but I can think of few better examples of how to actually use the medium to tell a story.