When we want to remember someone, we tell stories about them. When we’re processing our traumas, we create representations of them to ease the pain. And when we feel trapped, our imaginations can give us a comfort and a lifeline.
That’s the idea at the center of What Remains of Edith Finch, the 2017 game developed by Giant Sparrow and its creative director Ian Dallas. As I discussed with Robbie Dorman on The Serial Fanaticist Podcast, the game tells the story of the Finches, using a visit to an old family home to trace six generations’ worth of seemingly inevitable misfortunes, and the conflicting efforts to remember the individuals behind them and to avoid sharing their fates.
The visitor, in this case, is the eponymous Edith Finch, returning to the place where she grew up for the first time in six years, now the last member of the Finch family left standing. She’s there to retrace her family’s history and uncover the secrets hidden from her by her mom, but hinted at by her great grandmother. Over the course of the game, Edith puts the pieces together, getting a clearer and clearer picture of the different worlds her uncles and siblings and grandparents inhabited, getting closer and closer to uncomfortable truths about what might really have happened to them.
But the way that Edith gets to know these specters of the past is through arts and letters. Each departed family member left some token of themselves or their experiences behind: diaries, photographs, comic books, poems, journals, legal papers, drawings, and games. Each familial artifact the player finds puts them, and Edith, inside the head of the family member contained within it, letting each one tell their story in turn, thereby committing them to the next generation.
Or in some cases, inside their swingset.
And yet, What Remains of Edith Finch is equivocal about the power of those stories, or at least willing to countenance the danger of their allure. On the one hand, it may be a happier thing to imagine a child lost in a fantastical-if-grim adventure rather than cope with the truth of her having poisoned herself. It may be easier to process a great loss as the cause of a monster that lurks beyond the walls than as the result of prosaic violence. It may be comforting to imagine a joyful loved one transformed, rather than lost, and still happy in their new state.
But those sorts of escapes, those types of self-delusions, can also be pernicious in the world the game presents. They can cause people to blur the lines between fiction and reality, leaving them aiming for the ecstasy of the supernatural while blind to the dangers of the everyday. They can romanticize grisly things in ways that defang their rightful terror or constantly remind us of past pains we’d like to forget. They can provide avenues to turn away from the horrors that are too hard to face, from the grinding forces of grief and routine, until the connections to the world of the flesh and blood are eternally severed.
The personifications of these conflicting perspectives come via Edith’s great grandmother, Edie, who seeks to memorialize her fallen family members and pass their stories on, and via Edith’s mother, Dawn, who sees those stories as unwelcome reminders and false idols that robbed her of her loved ones and led them into darkness. In between them is Edith herself, the game’s narrator, main character, and player avatar, who’s trying to straighten out the crooked lines between her mom and great grandma and their different ideas in her return home.
What stands out in that journey is how uniquely Edith’s own story is told through the game itself. What Remains of Edith Finch immediately establishes a sense of place, with variety and creativity, in the old home that provides its setting. The Finch homestead is filled from floor to ceiling with books and cleaning supplies, hinting at a quiet war between those trying to hang onto the past and those trying to scrub it clean.
"Actually, it kind of works because most of those books are about arches."
Each room is a doorway into a different world, each with its own character and mode of telling the story of its former inhabitants. The house itself is creaky but warm, homey but full of mysteries, and provides a durable canvas that allows the game to recontextualize its backdrop across different eras and perspectives.
The game also blends form and function beautifully. Edith’s words, or those of her forebears, pop up in glowing letters across the environment, existing both as something separate from the world she’s experiencing and also an unavoidable part of it. They convey the information and establish the mood of the game’s narrative, while also guiding the player to each new destination.
The game also uses the different modes of storytelling at its center to convey its themes and ideas. The player may be asked to perform a repetitive, ordinary task with one hand and explore a fantasy world with the other, pulling them into the same confluence of drudgery and escapism their avatar is experiencing. They may control household objects as if by magic, little realizing the consequences to come. They may squeeze into crawl spaces, hear the rhythmic thumps of hammer meeting stone, or shift their gaze and notice the portent of why this trip matters so much right now. The player is a part of these events, not just an observer, which heightens their impact.
In that, What Remains of Edith Finch pays tribute to the force of a good story and the power of art, in any form, to put us into the heads of those who create it, to give those creators a way to come back to life, however fleetingly. The game leaves things ambiguous as to how much of what we see and experience in its tall tales is “real.” But regardless of whether the deer that crosses Edith’s path as she walks toward the house is ordinary fauna, or something more fantastical, it remains a symbol and a metonym for the parts of these stories that linger and affect us, that provide comfort and connection, regardless of whether they’re literally true.
The game is actually a stealth Bambi mid-quel.
In the end, the game answers its own implied question. What remains of Edith Finch is her story. And what remains of the Finches is this place, a living monument and museum to the lives that this woe-begotten family lived, constantly built upon again and again, full of fantasies and tragedies intertwined. It is a place of great imagination but also great loss, the two inseparable from one another. It is a place that lives on, and with it, so do those who once inhabited it.
The game’s end credits begin with a simple tribute, “For Shirley Dallas,” the real life mother of the game’s creative director, and a corresponding date, like so many that Edith herself scribbles into her journal. What Remains of Edith Finch plays coy about whether Edie or Dawn is in the right about the proper place of family lore in the Finches’ lives. But with that final in memoriam, and in the game taken as a whole, the creators tip their hand about which side they fall on.
What Remains of Edith Finch is, ultimately, an embrace of the way that these creative expressions, including the game itself, allow us to pay tribute to and hang onto those closest to us, even when they’re gone. Bad things happen to the people we love, but telling stories about them, imagining them in better places or close by in other forms, making art and spinning tales that celebrate their lives, helps us to preserve them, to understand them, and ultimately, to keep them with us.
