What Remains of Edith Finch is a first-person exploration video game developed by Giant Sparrow and published by Annapurna Interactive. The game was released in 2017 for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One; for Nintendo Switch in 2019; for iOS in 2021; and for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2022.
The story follows the seventeen-year-old Edith Finch, the last surviving member of her family, as she returns to her ancestral home for the first time in seven years. Reexploring the house, she uncovers her family's mysterious past and learns about the series of deaths that eventually caused the complete collapse of her family structure. The game is presented as an interconnected anthology. The story utilizes unique media from multiple perspectives and is told through a series of vignettes; however, the player is made to doubt the authenticity of each story being told. The magical realist story touches on themes of free will, fate, memory, and death.
What Remains of Edith Finch received critical acclaim, receiving praise for its immersive storytelling, characters, and presentation; and is considered an example of video games as an art form. Among other awards and nominations, it won the British Academy Games Award for Best Game 2017 and the Best Narrative category at both The Game Awards 2017 and the 2018 Game Developers Choice Awards.
Gameplay
What Remains of Edith Finch is a narrative-focused adventure game. As Edith, the player explores the Finch house and surrounding wilderness through a semi-linear series of rooms, footpaths, crawlspaces, and secret passages. Edith's narration guides the player, providing commentary on her own thoughts, experiences, and relations to each character; and therefore provides exposition and nuance relating to many of the semi-self-contained sequences in the game. Various narrative-related objects such as books, clutter, and decorations provide Edith this opportunity; which is framed as the vocalization of Edith's own writings in her journal revealed chronologically as she makes her way through the house. Throughout which, the player encounters the former bedrooms of deceased family members which have been memorialized and preserved since the time of the respective individual's death. Having the option to skip multiple sequences, the player interacts with objects placed at these memorials to progress through the story, each of which inspire a unique vignette revealing the circumstances of each person's death. These vignettes vary wildly in medium, perspective, genre, stylization, and gameplay mechanics, as well as intent and veracity of their source; therefore providing a series of unique and semi-self-contained stories throughout the game, oftentimes evoking themes of magical realism, the total accuracy of which the player is made to doubt.
Plot The player character takes a ferry to Orcas Island, Washington carrying the journal of Edith Finch. The journal details Edith's experience returning to her ancestral home on the island for the first time in seven years. As a 17-year-old, Edith writes that she is the last surviving member of her family. The player then takes the perspective of Edith as she reexplores the house and discovers the alleged circumstances of each relative's death, the authenticity of which is confused due to the unique mediums and perspectives of each source.
Edith explains that her family is believed to be cursed because of the untimely deaths they frequently experience. In 1937, in an effort to escape the curse after the death of his wife Ingeborg and newborn son Johann, Edith's great-great-grandfather Odin Finch emigrates from Norway to the United States. Alongside his daughter Edith (Edith Sr., or 'Edie'), her husband Sven (né Hoffstad), and their newborn daughter Molly, he ferries his family house with them. However, waves off the shore of Orcas Island capsize the house and Odin drowns. The remaining family builds a new home and accompanying graveyard nearby. Here, Edie gives birth to Barbara, twins Calvin and Sam, and Walter.
For a while, Edie believes they have left the curse behind, but unusual tragedies begin to befall her family. At 10 years old, Molly dies after ingesting fluoridated toothpaste and holly berries due to her mother's neglect; at 16, Barbara is murdered after a heated argument with her boyfriend Rick; at 11, Calvin falls to his death after swinging off the edge of a cliff; at 49, Edie's husband Sven dies during a construction accident at the house; and, at 53, after spending 30 years living in a bunker beneath the house, Walter finally decides to leave and is immediately hit by a train upon exiting. Edie memorializes each death by turning their respective bedrooms into shrines.
Sam marries a woman named Kay Carlyle, and they have three children: Dawn, Gus, and Gregory. However, Dawn is the only one to live to adulthood. At 22 months, Gregory drowns in the bathtub after being left unattended by his mother; and, at 13, Gus is crushed while flying a kite during a storm. Sam and Kay get a divorce and, at 33, whilst on a hunting trip with Dawn, Sam falls to his death after being bucked from a cliff by a deer.
Traumatized, Dawn moves to Kolkata, India, marries Sanjay Kumar, and they have three children: Lewis, Milton, and Edith (Jr.). In 2002, Sanjay dies in an earthquake and Dawn returns with her children to the Finch home. At 11 years old, Milton inexplicably disappears, and Dawn becomes paranoid. She seals off the memorialized bedrooms of the deceased and forbids her children from learning about their family history in an effort to save them from a similar fate.
In 2010, after struggling with substance abuse and mental illness, Lewis commits suicide at the age of 21, cutting his head off with the fish-cutting machine he used at work. Now desperate, Dawn decides they must all leave the house. Edie, however, refuses to go, and, after a heated argument, Dawn and Edith flee the house without her, leaving most of their possessions behind. The next day, Edie is found dead at the age of 93 after consuming alcohol alongside her prescription medication.
Seven years later, Dawn succumbs to an undisclosed illness and 17-year-old Edith inherits the property. Returning to the house, Edith discovers for herself the stories of her family's unique history, documenting her own thoughts and experiences in her journal. Edith reveals that she is pregnant (though the player can figure this out already if they look straight down) and that the journal is intended for her unborn child in case she should die before she is able to tell them the stories herself.
In the final scene, the initial player character seen on the ferry at the start of the game is revealed to be Edith's son, Christopher, Edith having died during the labor in 2017. In an unspecified time in the future, Christopher places flowers on his mother's grave.
Development
What Remains of Edith Finch is the second game developed by the team at Giant Sparrow, led by creative director Ian Dallas. Their debut effort was the BAFTA-award-winning The Unfinished Swan. The concept of What Remains of Edith Finch grew out from trying to create something sublime, as described by Dallas, "an interactive experience that evokes what it feels like to have a moment of finding something beautiful, yet overwhelming". Dallas embodied this concept by using his own experience as a scuba diver while he had lived in Washington State, and seeing the ocean fall off into darkness into the distance. The game initially was based on this scuba diving approach, but this created a number of problems with conveying narrative. While the game was in this state, they came up with the idea of using floating text captions of the narrative to be seen by the player, which remained as a key gameplay element through the game's ongoing changes. The team struggled on the diver idea until Dallas came up with the idea of a shark falling into a forest with a child uttering the line "and suddenly I was a shark", which sparked the idea of moving into more strange and unnatural scenarios; this specific one would eventually become the mini-experience for Molly, who died after eating poisonous holly berries and whose bedroom is the first the player explores in the game. While the Molly scenario was fleshed out further, the team broke out to develop other scenarios that captured the same sense, giving the player something interesting to watch or do but knowing that their characters were about to die, creating the type of experience they wanted to evoke.
To link these mini-experiences, they had to come up with a framing device. Initially, they considered a scenario similar to The Canterbury Tales but set in a modern-day high school, but soon recognized that placing these deaths in context of a cursed family would work better, forming an anthology work like The Twilight Zone, while borrowing concepts from the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which similarly involved the overlapping stories of various family members. With this approach set, the team then only had to determine the genealogical nature of this family and how the house should be styled. For the house itself, Dallas stated they had three words they worked from: sublime, intimate and murky. Their goal was to make the house itself feel like "a natural force. It begins to look almost like the bark of a tree; something that has an order to it, but it's too chaotic for us to be able to follow." While they had designed all the bedrooms in roughly the same order the player experienced them in the game, it was not until the second-to-last bedroom, that of Lewis who had been into marijuana use, that they realized that these bedrooms can be used to say much more about each family member by how they were decorated. Lewis' had been heavily decorated with posters and other items that indicated his drug abuse, and the team realized this shared a lot about his character they did not have to communicate via narration or the death sequence. Major changes were made to all the previous bedrooms to provide similar expository elements for each character over the last few months before release.