Game EXP: What Remains of Edith Finch

I feel like I am not qualified to talk about Giant Sparrow's 2017 first person exploration game What Remains of Edith Finch, but I am going to any because I recently finished this game and it was far more beautiful of an experience than I could ever convey with my clunky words.

I received a free copy of the game through Epic Games back in January after they launched their own client, so that was the platform that I played in on, using my fiver year old laptop.  I would say that for the most part, the game ran fine when I played it on medium settings even though the recommended settings suggested that I play it on the lowest settings across the board.  Yeah, my laptop chugged a bit and only crashed once shortly after I started, but once over the course of a number of hours, maybe five I think, is not too bad for a PC game running on a five year-old laptop. I do not think that I ever hit 30 fps, but this game is not about how accurate you are with a sniper rifle and 150 yards out, but about a young woman exploring her family's past.  I do not want to give away any more than that because for me, going into the game fully blind meant that I did not know what to expect and that made the entire game a lot more impactful.  Think of it like a mix between Dear Esther and Gone Home.  So if walking sims or similarly-styled games are not your thing, then I would still recommend this game because of how well the entire game was created.

In What Remains of Edith Finch, you play the character of Edith Finch as she explores her family's home in the Pacific Northwest, on a small island off the coast of Washington State.  The story it told through Edith's narration, voiced by Valerie Rose Lohman, who did a phenomenal job with the lines that were written for the character.  This story is played through a combination of present day exploration and through visualizations, some are fanciful to the point of absurdity, while others are the exact opposite and are steeped heavily in reality.  

One of the things that I loved about how the story in WRoEF is told, is that the histories of Edith's family are all told in a slightly different style, although all are in first person.  One stage/history might have you using WASD to swing on a swing set, while another has you grabbing a fish with the mouse, then moving it over under an industrial slicer.  The mechanics keep you, as the player, engaged in a way that you are simply not just walking from one instance of talking to another, but by actually participating in the history of the Finch Family.  And it is in this participation of inevitability and fate that make some of the stages/chapters kind of hard to complete from an emotional sense.  Because the Finch family is beset by tragedy, as the player you may pick up how a particular chapter is going to end before it does, but you are forced to play it out until the end.

That is part of where a lot of the emotional impact of the game comes from.  Combined with Valerie Rose Lohman's reading and performance as Edith, WRoEF elicited a very strong emotional response in me.  There were times when I was clenching my jaw holding my emotions back so that I could progress through the narrative.

Now, I did not take many (read any) screenshots while I was playing for two primary reasons.  The first one being that I was frequently too wrapped up in the story to think, "Oh this is nice, I should take a picture," and the second reason being that Epic's gaming client does not allow for ease of screenshots like either the Switch or Steam's client (F12).  Had I taken pictures, they would be dotting this article with pictures that taken out of context would not mean much, like looking through a strangers photo album (old time Facebook for you younglings out there).  And that's kind of what What Remains of Edith Finch boiled down to its base element, exploring someone else's family history with narrative.  There were no hidden un-lockables, collectables, or epic lootz in order to proceed.

This was a beautiful game in the purest sense of the word.  And no words I can write here can fully express my wish for everyone to play this game on your system of choice, and I am seriously considering picking this up for the Switch too, if only to actually give money to the developers instead of gracefully mooching from Epic Games' generosity.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental