Recent Playing: What Remains of Edith Finch

I'm five years late on this game, which is usually par for the course because I'm rarely looking to pay full price for a game. This was another Steam fall sale purchase. About the game, Steam says:

What Remains of Edith Finch is a collection of strange tales about a family in Washington state. As Edith, you’ll explore the colossal Finch house, searching for stories as she explores her family history and tries to figure out why she's the last one in her family left alive.

I remember hearing about What Remains years ago through Game Informer and wondering if a game like this could manage to make itself interesting. There's virtually no gameplay here; it's all narrative. You walk Edith through her monstrous childhood home and she relates to you various stories about her unfortunate family (Are they cursed? Is it all in their heads? Up to you.) The writing in a game like this is critical.

Now, having played it, I think What Remains deserves the praise it's gotten. This game does an excellent job of engaging you in Edith's world with the beautiful visual details and different methods of conveying each character's story. For each tale Edith tells you about a family member, you take on the relevant character and guide them through the tale. This puts you front and center for their fate, as the story usually centers around the events leading up to their last moments of life. To keep the game interesting, each narrative style is unique to the character it features. For example, one story is told as Edith reads a comic book about the event and you navigate the protagonist through the various panels of the comic.

Death is an overarching theme of What Remains; if death or surrounding issues are troubling or triggering for you, I recommend giving this one a hard pass. It addresses a lot of dark themes, although I think it handles them tactfully. It's easy to see, with so much life and trauma intertwining in the house, why it's difficult for Edith to parse out her feelings about her family and their ancestral home.

The house is located on Orcas Island, one of the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington, which I have to point out because I went camping almost yearly on Orcas Island when I was growing up; one year I went to summer camp at Camp Orkila. The artists captured the gloomy atmosphere of the area quite well! (Although I must note there is not, nor has there ever been, a train on Orcas Island.)

I really enjoyed What Remains and I will play it again. Visually it's a beautiful game. It's emotionally touching and I loved being drawn into the world of the Finches. The game really invites you to get to know each of them, if only for a brief time, and does some excellent visual storytelling in the spaces that belong to each character.

It's not a long game (took me about 2.5 hours to finish and I did hit all the stories), but I think it lasts just as long as it needs to.