What is important to note when going into What Remains of Edith Finch, one of the most acclaimed walking simulators ever made, is that there are technically two Edith Finchs within the game. The first and most obvious is the protagonist you play as through a majority of the game, and, without venturing too far into spoiler territory just yet, there is a good reason to think the title refers to her. The second, however, is the great-grandmother matriarch who goes by Edie by her family, the direct descendant of Odin Finch who moved his family to the bizarre house where the game takes place. Edie's father moved his house onto a boat and sailed from Norway to Orcas Island in the Pugent Sound near Seattle. As he got to the beach, however, his boat wrecked, and his daughter, son in law, and granddaughter take the lifeboat to shore as he goes down with the house. There near the beach Edie and her family built the Finch home, overlooking the Sound and, at low tide, the wrecked peaks of the house Odin attempted to sail across the sea can be seen jutting out of the water. The reason for Odin's taking his family from Norway was to escape the infamous family curse, which causes most of the Finch family to die in sometimes odd accidents, and often very, very young. If Odin's death before landing in Washington state wasn't enough to tip you off, he was unsuccessful.
Over the course of three generations, the mythology of the Finch curse drenches the home young Edith visits in What Remains of Edith Finch. Every member of the family from Edie on to the youngest Edith have their own rooms, including those dead, each of them left nearly as they were when their inhabitants were alive. Edith's mother Dawn, fed up with the family curse story, seals each of the rooms up so that her youngest doesn't venture in and learn too much about something she feels is a dark, polluting fantasy. Edie, who seems to value the family curse and created virtual museums of the Finchs with their rooms, attempts to undermine the skeptical Dawn by making peepholes in each of the bedroom doors, which is Edith's only experience with most of these rooms until the game begins. Edith, now 17 and recently inheriting a key from your mother after her recent death, ventures back to Orcas Island as the last living Finch to discover her family history, and the supposed curse that her mother tried so hard to hide from her. If this sounds interesting so far, I strongly recommend you stop reading now and play the game, as it is best experienced knowing as little as possible. The game is a total of two hours, which may feel a bit short for the price, but if you think of this as being one of the most interactactive films/books you'll experience, it may alleviate any anxieties you have about price. I also strongly recommend playing it all in one sitting. You absolutely won't regret it.
Spoilers from here on out.
The reason I bring your attention to the title in reference to two characters in the game is because the game is attempting to make an important dichotomy between the Finchs as Edie sees them and the Finchs as Edith will now perceive them. Edie loves the family curse, even though it took her husband and four of her five kids. In Edie's room, as a matter of fact, she has a small shrine to her late husband that is largely focused on his death by a collapsing dragon slide he was building (the remnants of which you can find in a little pond in front of the house). Notably, Edie is said to tell everyone her husband was killed by a dragon. Edie has an obsession with mythologizing the deaths of her family, and this becomes less surprising as the story develops. Going from room to room learning of each of the family members death you will soon realize most of the family members have a passionate feel for artistic expression, or at least some sort of hobby (as with Sam, the only child of Edie to have kids himself and the father of Dawn, and his hunting and survival skills). Edie herself takes slices of tree trunks and paints the faces of her dead family members, one for each room. Edie's primary artistic expression seems to be the furthering of their family's death mythology, and there are several moments when this crosses over to negligence.
In each person's room, there is either something that tells you the death of that family member (such as Edith's older brother and middle child of Dawn, named Milton, and his flip book before he went missing). In most, however, there is some writing that ports you to a mini-section where you relive that character's death, almost always spun into some optimistic, dream-like surrealism. First comes Molly, Edie's youngest daughter. You wake as her sometime in December, having been sent to bed without dinner and incredibly hungry. You get out of bed and attempt to look for food. Notably, if you try the bedroom door, you will find it locked, and Molly will call to her mother to let her out to which Edie will reply she should just go to bed. Instead, Molly will eat a dried carrot originally meant for her pet hamster, a whole tube of toothpaste, and berries off of mistletoe hung on a windowsill in her bathroom. Mistletoe doesn't kill people, but it is poisonous, and it seems obvious here that it is meant as the realistic explanation for Molly's death (there are also notes from the game creators that this is the case). Instead, this dream-like scene has Molly opening the window a crack (the window is chained shut), and the game plays with the idea that her true death will be falling out of this window. What happens instead is Molly is transformed into a cat, and you must chase a bird through trees until you transform again into an owl, again into a shark, and finally into a tentacle monster that kills the entire crew on a boat off the shore of Orcas Island, and then crawling your way through the sewers, out of Molly's toilet, and underneath her bed. This story comes from Molly's final diary entry on the night she died, and Edith makes note that while she doesn't believe it, she is sure Edie did. What should immediately give you pause is how Molly's room was locked, something that could easily have prevented this death as Molly could have gone downstairs to get something to eat. This horrifying realization, though relatively subtle here, is something that will continue throughout the game. In the game's most horrifying sequence, you play as a baby left alone in a bath, where your imagination turns the baby being drowned into a fantastic water-ballet to Sam's narration, the baby's father. This narration comes from a note Sam wrote on his divorce papers, where he tells his wife it wasn't her fault the baby died, and that he believed their baby boy saw the world as a place of wonder, and that the baby was happier now. It is a sickening, fantasy excuse for what is apparent negligence. While this story specifically isn't from Edie, it is in her style of mythologizing, and furthers one of the main narrative threads, that Edie's mythologizing created a fantastic belief among her children in the curse, and in the beauty in death.
Edie doesn't just give negligence an excuse with her mythologizing, but directly exploits it. Her longest living son, Walter, saw his older sister Barbara, younger sister of Molly, murdered when he was a kid. Walter was around 10, and from there on he locks himself in a hidden bunker underneath the house, a secret so well hidden that Edith didn't know he was there, even when his death happened while she was 6 years old and living in the house. Walter dies when he gets sick of locking himself away for 30 years, and decides to sledgehammer his way out of one of the walls into a train tunnel, where he is subsequently run over by a train. Notably, Walter could have just gone up into the house and left, but instead he broke his way out, directly leading to his death. Before this, however, Edie had talked to a tabloid about a mole-man living underneath the Finch house, directly exploiting Walter's miserable existence to further mythologize the strangeness of her family's legacy. Each story in this game can either be seen as negligence or tragic self destruction. This comes to a head with one of the final deaths in the game, the death of Edith's eldest brother Lewis. Lewis never managed to accomplish anything with his life, something we could partially see as being a product of trauma due to his younger bother having gone missing, and the inability of his mother to accept Milton may be dead. No matter the reason, Dawn attempts to give Lewis something normal and gets him a job at a cannery chopping the heads off fish and throwing them down a shoot onto a conveyor belt. Marijuana is found in his room, the walls are covered in blacklight posters and there is a gaming rig in the corner, making it easy to apply a stoner-gamer archetype to Lewis that I think is completely intentional. Fantasy seems incredibly important to Lewis, and Lewis' death scene/level is provoked by a letter form his therapist to his mother, where his therapist talks about encouraging Lewis into sobriety, and how this led to Lewis fantasizing while at work. This is easily the best sequence in the game, where you are required to do your job cutting fish heads off with one of the sticks, while you play through Lewis' fantasy with the other. The fantasy starts as something in the corner, non-obstructive and easily managed, but quickly grows to eventually take over the entire screen to the point where the conveyor belt at Lewis' job is now obscured. This fantasy develops in complexity until finally, as the fantasy version of Lewis, you walk through the door of your castle and find yourself no longer in the fantasy, but rather at the cannery. you walk through the drab factory, see another Lewis miming his work, but not actually performing it, and walk yourself up the conveyor belt into another room that magnificently transforms into your fantasy once again. It is important to note here that to cut the fishes heads off, Lewis used a mini guillotine style chopping device, something meant to give you tension as you play through the sequence since it seems to allude to a serious injury surely coming. Instead, when you get to the end of your fantasy you must bend down to receive your crown - bend down into what is explicitly a guillotine. There is a graphic sound of slicing before the therapist's words are shown on screen, simply stating "I think you know the rest." Lewis' fantasy wasn't a delusion of death, it was a delusion of reality, something he could not come to terms with, and it lead to his suicide, the only death explicitly said to be a suicide. The fact that this is the last death fully experienced in the game is no coincidence, as it is the culmination of Edie's negligent fantasy. Rather than the death mythology explaining away the horror of what happens to the poor Finch kids, a different mythology lead to the self infliction of death. It is the art imitates life, life imitates art dichotomy.
Edith is 22 weeks pregnant. The game ends with her son being born, it heavily implied that Edith died in childbirth, and her son Christopher laying flowers at her grave at the Finch residence you've spent the whole game exploring. Throughout the game, Edith ruminates on whether it is worthwhile writing this book for her unborn son about their family history, about whether it would be better forgotten, realizing eventually that more than likely the only way her child would ever read it would be if she was already dead. The title What Remains of Edith Finch wants you to believe that this son is what it is referring to, but more accurately it is the senior Edith Finch in my opinion. Edie Finch's mythologizing more than likely become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and what remains of her is this dark legacy that her decedents fear to pass on. They want to forget it, and the curse, but the family tradition of appreciating a fantastical story lives on, and so with Edith as with Edie, she can't quite let a good story die. What Remains of Edith Finch is an incredibly engrossing narrative, one that utilizes the interactive medium more than it does games in order to tell a provocative story about death, about stories, and about powerful but sometimes dangerous use of mythologizing reality. The game wants you to confront and find out what really happened, what lies between the myths to what is really there, and in doing so creates something fantastical that finds a direct line to something incredibly real.
9.5
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