Suddenly I was a Shark!: My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch
Author: Caleb J. Ross; Ross
Date: 2024-04-28T05:00:00+00:00

Suddenly I was a Shark!

My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch

Caleb J. Ross

Copyright © 2023 Caleb J. Ross

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the written permission of the author.

Polymedia
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Cover design and internal layout, Caleb J. Ross

Cover image, Victor Zastol'skiy

ISBN-9798388556080

Version 1.02

To my fellow humans with video-game-shaped heads.

Always remember, games are real.

CONTENTS

The Finch Family Tree

The Pregnant Woman

One: On the Path

Dear Christopher #1

Two: Let’s Go for a Walk

Three: Surrounded by the Magical and the Surreal

Dear Christopher #2

Four: Welcome to the Hub World

Dear Christopher #3

Five: Welcome Christopher

Six: The Birth of the Curse

Dear Christopher #4

Seven: Answers in the Library

Eight: The Deaths

Molly’s Death

Edie’s Room

Calvin’s Death

Barbara’s Death

Walter’s Death

Sam’s Death

Gregory’s death

Gus’s Death

Milton’s Disappearance

Lewis’s Death

Edie’s Death

Dawn’s Death

Edith’s Death

Nine: Almost Dead

Dear Christopher #5

Notes

Thanks

About the Author

The Finch Family Tree

The Pregnant Woman

Let me start at the beginning, with the pregnant woman, years before I met Edith Finch and her family.

_____

Seconds before the naked woman was to enter the room, the art professor stage-whispered to the classroom “she’s pregnant.”

This would be the first naked body I’d ever been told to draw. I assume as well for the rest of the undergrad art students lining the room’s perimeter, surrounding an empty knee-high table in the center of the run-down studio space. The table had been draped with a paint-stained blanket as a gesture of comfort for the body it would soon display. I wanted to offer my own coat, like I’ve seen gentlemen in old cartoons do with their jackets to bridge water puddles for women in fancy shoes. But I didn’t. I only adjusted my easel, an inch to the left, maybe two inches back, as though I needed only to arrive at the correct angle to prove to the room that I deserved to be there.

We were there, in this university studio space, to become artists, and artists—we’d been told—understand the human form beyond the visceral. Carnal lust is for the weak-willed. Skin and hair, eyes and lips, these aren’t sources of temptation but are instead beacons of inspiration. In a small college town starved of the coffee shops and hookah bars that adorned our distant, romanticized cityscapes, this drab classroom in the near-center of rural Kansas became our reluctant proving ground. Rubber meets road. Mind meets mouth. Pencil meets paper. But still, nervous eyes tripped throughout the room, and asses shifted in creaking wooden chairs. She would be naked, and we would stare at her. This would be awkward.

The art professor’s mentorship so far had been relegated strictly to the practical side of the art domain—how pencil grades impact the value range, the different surface strengths of drawing paper, how to clean a kneaded eraser—but that morning he’d been charged with teaching etiquette to a classroom of confused barely-adults. Should we make eye contact with the model? If not, where should we look? Everywhere, right; we’re drawing the entire body after all. But won’t it be weird? Staring at a naked woman in public is uncomfortable for all, and especially so if that naked woman is pregnant, right?

Unfortunately for all of us, the art professor had no idea we’d heaved this responsibility upon him. We were baby birds searching for a half-chewed worm mash. And he was the mother bird, happily chewing and swallowing, unaware of the helpless and hungry chicks.

So, I searched his face for hints to pair with the whispered “she’s pregnant.” Maybe his narrowed eyes convey an apology. Maybe this disappointed man who prides himself in “pure” specimens is sad to present stretch marks and swollen ankles to his students. Maybe he’d assume any respect we had for him was now at risk of waning. His job would be at risk. He’d be homeless within weeks. Dead within months. Forgotten within years.

Maybe.

Or were those eyes narrowed to make room for pursed lips, curled at their ends in a tight, giddy grin? Rather than an imperfection, maybe the model’s pregnancy was an asset, a frame us burgeoning artists could build our legacies upon. We were all looking for an angle and here was ours. Maybe the way we’d choose to depict this natural eccentricity would reflect the way we’d be perceived as artists for now and forever. The world would champion the art professor as the progenitor to a generation of art geniuses.

Maybe.

Or were his eyes perhaps welling with tears? Should we impart upon this man a history of lost fatherhood? Was his whisper a warning against getting too close? Was he cautioning us against falling in love too soon with the unborn child? “The mother’s smiling now, but any time over the next nine months, she could be crying.” A tear falls. “Trust me. I was almost a father once.”

Maybe.

I could perceive all these implications simultaneously, like an emotional Schrodinger’s Cat, a face both intentional and unintentional. So, which do I choose? Which would be the filter for the story I’d tell my roommates, and one day my wife, and our kids, and their kids. “My grandpa,” they’d say, “once took an art class from a man who thought pregnant women were the most beautiful women.” Or “my grandpa’s art teacher cried in class because the naked pregnant lady reminded him of his dead baby.” Or “here’s a picture my Grandpa drew in college,” my granddaughter would say, pulling the yellowed image from a forgotten portfolio left to mildew in a damp basement. Presenting it to her friend she’d say, “he keeps it hidden because the woman was pregnant. He wanted to draw a regular woman,” she’d say, the negative influence surviving another generation.

I forget the art professor’s name, but I remember his face, its various implications, and how I cycled through them, never sure which I was supposed to accept as the truth. I could push on with a story seeded by any of the three faces, and each would be true enough. One event. One narrator. Three stories. All true. How?

The pregnant woman entered the room amid our arrested-breath and walked to the center of the room. She laid down upon the blanket-draped, knee-high table that the art professor had positioned that morning. I imagined him repositioning the table again and again, controlling the room as much as control is possible.

The model disrobed. We expected stretch marks and swollen ankles, maybe an innie belly button forced outie by the growing child inside, but...nothing. She couldn’t have been but a few weeks pregnant. Had the art professor not whispered to us just minutes earlier, we’d all be uncomfortable only in the standard staring-at-a-naked-stranger way.

So she laid there for about one hour, about five unflattering sketches’ worth of time, long enough for her legs to fall asleep, for my legs to fall asleep, for 8,400 beats of the baby heart that we have to trust is inside her. Like the art professor, she too carried a malleable expression, her own catalyst to multiple true stories. Fear or discomfort could have guided her stoicism. Or it could have been she was doing the math to see how much longer she had to determine if she wanted to keep the baby.

So many universes were born that day.

One: On the Path

“As a child, the house made me uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t put into words...”

-Edith Finch

That art professor’s eyes. One event. One narrator. Three stories. All true. How? Every event contains infinite stories. Infinite beginnings. Infinite endings. Infinite ways to change infinite audiences.

So let me try again: I’m just going to start at a beginning, with a pregnant woman.

_____

Edith Finch stands on the estate side of a padlocked chain-link gate. The fence’s top rail behind her has bent to the weight of her body where she had heaved herself over. Surmounting this shaky fence could not have been easy.

She faces down a winding asphalt path toward the home that she and her mother escaped from seven years ago. The asphalt is buckled and broken; the world below has refused to settle during those empty years. Tree roots have rippled the ground. Ivy reclaims the wooden barrier lining the path like it’s trying to rip down this safety measure, to make any intruder’s journey a dangerous one. But Edith would not have returned if danger worried her.

Edith is the lone surviving member of the Finch family, following 11 deaths beginning with her Great-great-grandfather, Odin. She’s returned here to her childhood home, following her own mother’s recent passing, to learn the truth of these strange deaths, to learn if what her Great-grandmother Edie claimed is true: the Finch family is cursed.

This asphalt path she’s on leads to many things. For the Giant Sparrow development team, this path at the start of their game What Remains of Edith Finch leads to a 2018 BAFTA Award for Best Game, a NAVGTR Award for Best Original Adventure Game, a SXSW Gaming Awards award for Excellence in Narrative, a 2017 The Game Awards award for Best Narrative, and a slew of nominations. For gamers it leads to either the epitome of an underappreciated gaming genre or it leads to further evidence of an over-appreciated one. For me—an author of several books of fiction—it changes my entire understanding of the power of story. And it will change you, too, as it has so many players. Jimmy Fallon, Saturday Night Live alumnus and host of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, says of the game, “it’s one of my favorite things … it’s gonna change your life.”

But for 17-year-old Edith Finch, the path leads to her childhood home, tucked away within the sublime forests along the coasts of America’s Pacific Northwest. This is a world of vagabonds and misfits. This is a world of hope and death. This is a world where trees and cliffs meet, each offering opposing options for escape. A tree points optimistically upward into open sky while a cliff offers a fall downward into the sea. The Finch home itself, then, is a limbo trapped between exits.

There are no shops out here. No schools. No neighbors. Only one restaurant, a Chinese takeout, delivers this far outside proper civilization. But the woods, though they are forever patient, are unquestionably alive. “The woods around the house have always been uncomfortably silent,” Edith says as I guide her along the path from the padlocked gate to her empty childhood home. “As though they are about to say something but never do.”

Breathtaking, you could call it; Edith’s world is one that threatens to take your breath just as it has taken the breath of Edith’s family.

_____

What Remains of Edith Finch is set in a house framed by trees that are themselves framed by the Pacific Northwest’s cruel geography. This region’s reputation for awe is in full force here, guiding me forward toward Edith’s house despite persistent unease.

Creative Director Ian Dallas wanted What Remains of Edith Finch to give the player a feeling of the sublime, of being stricken by beauty while also fearful of it. The game’s setting certainly primes the story for the sublime. Its geography and citizenry clash and complement to create a uniquely alluring world. Portland, Oregon author Katherine Dunn once identified the Pacific Northwest as a place of misfits, reasoning that those who want to escape their hometowns for a better life travel west and then migrate north for its cheap cost of living. To Chuck Palahniuk, a fellow Portland author, she said “we just accumulate more and more strange people. All we are are the fugitives and refugees,” which gave Palahniuk the title of his 2003 Portland, Oregon travelogue, Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon.

Parts of the Pacific Northwest still today maintain a reputation for a vagabond culture that proudly rejects homogeneity while proclaiming acceptance.[1] This is a land where mainstream narratives are met with suspicion. Pacific Northwest native Kurt Cobain, of the band Nirvana which popularized Seattle grunge music for the world in the early 1990s, famously rejected the rockstar flamboyance narrative of preceding generations. “There is nothing in the world I like more than pure underground music,” Cobain told Sassy in April of 1992. “Pure” and “underground” are anathema to the then-popular adornments of mainstream success: machismo, big hair, and pyrotechnic stage shows. That same year Nirvana’s song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” won an MTV Video Music Award, one of the highest honors given by the once-dominant television channel and arbiter of popular music. The song title etched into the award placard misspells “Teen” as “Team.” This error surely didn’t change Cobain’s opinion of the mainstream.

As an angsty teenager, I loved what Nirvana embodied despite Cobain dying and the group having disbanded before I reached those teenage years. I felt trapped in my small town in Kansas, and I looked to the Pacific Northwest as a land of compatible souls. But even when I graduated high school and applied to universities, I never considered an actual move to the West. I felt comfortable keeping that world at arm’s length. I was shaped by the lyrics of a dead man, but I was unwilling to tempt the world that had shaped him. In that way, Edith is much braver than I am. The world she’s returning to is armed and eager to shape her, and she’s ready for it.

From the padlocked gate, I look toward the path’s end. At the top of this hill in the center of the forest, cropped at the center of the player’s screen, a cathedral-like spire juts from the horizon. It’s rejected by the surrounding world. An expunged poison. A final breath from a dying Earth. Pus from a popped zit. This is my destination. This misshapen, confusing, and unsafe structure—obviously unsafe even from this distance of several hundred feet—was Edith’s home just seven years ago.

From this distance, the house’s strange construction could be the product of a weary believer driven by an impatient god to hastily construct an idol. Or it could equally be the purposeful work of a craftsman inspired by the fantastical logic of a Rube Goldberg machine. After numerous playthroughs, I’m still not sure which is more accurate.

One thing is for sure: the impossible house is intoxicating. So, I do the only thing the game allows me to do at this point. I walk toward the house. Slowly. The world slumbers as I shift along the path before me. A slow walk, as it turns out, is a great way to turn the world itself into an epiphany.

Dear Christopher #1

Dear Christopher,

I’m sorry to hear about your mother. Edith was a wonderful person. I hope you don’t blame yourself for what happened. Sometimes … sometimes birth is a tricky thing.

Personally, I think birth is overrated. Birth is confusing and nasty and long and boring. It takes years before a person even knows they’ve been born. What a waste of time. Death, though … death changes a person. Death is powerful. Death is so strong a force that even almost-death changes a person.

2008, when I fell asleep at the wheel, driving my family home from a Thanksgiving dinner at my mother’s house, I awoke weightless, mid-air. That almost-death changed me.

High School, I led my grade-school sister, her hand in mine, across thin ice over a deep pond, with temperatures barely cold enough to register visible breath. I was responsible for her life, but I was too stupid to know it. I can still hear the ice crack with every one of my steps, and with every one of her much, much tinier steps. Mere hours later, the ice had completely melted away. Me and my baby sister should be dead. That vanishing ice changed me.

Elementary School, following a comedy & music variety show at the Burlington Opry, I remember the unseasonable humidity in the air, the hot smell of burst tire rubber, the weighty creak of my friend’s family van as it rocked off an ill-placed jack, the heavy thunk as the van crashed against the concrete, and the heat … I can still feel the heat of the van chassis against my eleven-year-old face as the van settled just centimeters above my forehead. I just wanted to know what the underside of a van looked like. I didn’t mean to kick the jack. That van changed me.

Psychologists call this a flashbulb memory. During moments of high stress, the brain opens itself up to more stimuli than normal. The brain awakens; it becomes hyper impressionable. Insatiable, even. Hungry for the world around it. You have no control. Whether or not I want to remember the sound of my friend in the distance, laughing as the van settles, that’s not up to me. My brain took over.

The brain, when it wants, will eat the world around you.

But it is possible to trick your brain, to prime your brain for a feast. Imagine, looking back on any moment in your life, any event, any story, and feeling the same life-affirming dread as I did when that 1991 tan and brown Dodge passenger van settled against my idiot eleven-year-old face.

2019, I met your mother, your uncles, your grands and great-grands and great-great-grands, and I saw them die. And every one of them was my own almost-death. I asked my brain to eat, and so it did.

So, sure, your mom died. But, for what it’s worth, without her death I wouldn’t be nearly as alive as I am today.

Every story can be your own almost-death, your own brain feast, if only you agree that it can be.

Walk with me…

Your friend,

Caleb

Two: Let’s Go for a Walk

“You do so, so much more in this game than walking”

-Ian Dallas

The term walking simulator began as an insult meant to discredit the type of video game that trades traditional ‘shoot, jump, run’ mechanics for a passive ‘walk, investigate a thing, walk some more’ set of mechanics. I understand the impulse. Any deviation from convention will arouse suspicion. A walking simulator exchanges the traditional, comfortable measures of video game progress—experience points, kill counts, ability upgrades, etc.—with intangible signposts along a story arc. The player isn’t chasing a score. The player is chasing narrative beats. This can be hard for some gamers who’ve come to love traditional gameplay.

Nontraditional gameplay isn’t the only hurdle for players new to the walking simulator genre. Perhaps what has plagued the genre most of all is that the video game industry itself hasn’t rallied around a definition. Core genres are generally easy to define given their breadth. Action games contain action. Adventure games contain adventure. Role-playing games (RPGs) contain role-playing elements, and so on. “Action,” “adventure,” and “RPG” are umbrella descriptors that can be applied to a variety of games and can be understood by many players. The logical way to precisely define specific games then is to serialize these terms. Action-adventure. Action-RPG. Sports Action-RPG. Inevitably, the hyphenate chain grows both unwieldy enough and popular enough to warrant a brand new genre. Players of the action-adventure-exploration game series Metroid and Castlevania opted for a fun-to-say portmanteau. If you know the exploration-focused and action-heavy nature of a Metroid or Castlevania game, then you’ll know a Metroidvania. Similarly, the punishing action-RPG games Demon Souls and Dark Souls leverage the game names to categorize action-RPG games with deep lore, intricate combat, and unforgiving difficulty. The popularity of these games has allowed the genre “Soulslike” to flourish.

These naming conventions are convenient, of course, but what happens when genre names divorce themselves from umbrella genres and from source games? Furthermore, what happens when those who coin the genre name do so with malevolent intent? Confusion. Disagreement. Vitriol. Division. These combative reactions are unfortunate given the genre’s staunchly anti-combative nature.

Walking simulator adversaries have had fun coming up with alternative names to the traditionally mellow gameplay style, which ranges from the helpful and innocuous—for example, “first-person experiences,” “interactive stories,” and “scenic games”—to the goading but generally pretty funny. A few of my favorite humorous tries are “low velocity bipedal transport trainers,” “ungames,” and “walk ‘em ups.”[2]

Even Creative Director Ian Dallas himself dismisses the term for being reductive. During a Reddit AMA[3] in July 2017, Dallas said of his game’s categorization: “it does feel a bit strange to describe What Remains of Edith Finch as a ‘walking simulator’ because you do so, so much more in this game than walking… we created tons of unique gameplay for each story in the game.” But he quickly acknowledges that “it’s nice to have ANY name that encompasses all the crazy new things people are trying … so I’m happy for that.”

So until we offer an equally catchy but more benevolent term, we’re stuck with (or we embrace) “walking simulator.”

_____

Though the term “walking simulator” came to prominence in the 2010s, the walking simulator genre dates back at least three decades earlier with the release of Graham Relf’s games The Forest and Explorer. These early exploration-focused games were commercial failures. The walking simulator, as we know it today, would first coalesce with 2008’s Dear Esther.[4]

Dear Esther focuses on first-person explorative adventuring and environmental storytelling above all else. Just like What Remains of Edith Finch, Dear Esther contains no combat, no skill tree, no health system, no points, and no game over. You play as an unnamed and unimportant character tasked with exploring an uninhabited island in the Hebrides archipelago off the coast of Scotland. The game relishes in the stark depression that the setting implies by encouraging the player to discover letter fragments written by an anonymous narrator to his deceased wife. This is the game’s sole motivator. The game is beautiful to look at, and easy to play, but emotionally difficult to experience; qualities that would become common with the genre.

As an early entry in the walking simulator genre, novelty drove much of Dear Esther’s design and gameplay, thereby ensuring that novelty too would drive much of the post-release conversation. Critics compared the game to art-house films, and poems, applauding its “ethereal atmosphere” and lack of puzzles: “Without puzzles, the visuals and narrative are allowed to take precedence,” writes Chris Thrusten in PC Gamer. In short, by actively refusing to be a traditional game, Dear Esther ensured gaming journalists talked about little beyond its nontraditional approach.

Dear Esther requires no skills outside of minimal hand-eye coordination and a bit of endurance. Even the game world itself warrants only superficial exploration. Every meander down a dirt path or timid peek over a damp cliff lacks the positive feedback loop traditionally necessary to keep players motivated. There’s a reason weapons, points, and levels (and the variety of stimuli they imply) have been mainstays in gaming since the industry’s inception while art-house film-like visual-poem games were originally met with hostility.

Dear Esther’s creator Dan Pinchbeck was well aware of his game’s deviation. In a 2009 interview with Gamasutra[5] Pinchbeck speaks to the game’s impetus, citing his desire to explore what happens when traditional gameplay is removed from the first-person perspective environment. “So you have nothing but story to keep a player engaged; is that possible? What kind of experience does that leave? What does the space you free up by losing all those gameplay mechanisms and activities allow you to do?” For Pinchbeck, this allowed him to create what he calls an “interactive ghost story” and with it all the fear, discomfort, and ambiguity that the descriptor signifies. Critical reception was generally positive. Players were less impressed. But this is something Pinchbeck surely expected. The game, by design, was an experiment meant to challenge tradition. Pinchbeck continues: “It was the idea of just how abstract and problematic you could make a story and retain it being this engaging experience. Can you have a really quite non-linear, non-literal story, that’s almost more of a mood piece, rather than a traditional narrative, and, basically, get away with that?”

Get away with it, he did. The Dear Esther experiment went on to receive many awards and accolades from critics, but more importantly, by nature of its divisiveness among players, the game spurred important conversations about the walking simulator genre. Some praised the new genre’s willingness to be different while others admonished it for the same. These conversations would guide future iterations of the genre, allowing the walking simulator to mostly shed the dismissiveness of the term and ultimately embrace the non-game approach as legitimate.

In 2012, Dear Esther received many awards, including the prize for “Excellence in Visual Arts” at the Independent Games Festival, a “Best Use of Narrative” prize from MCV/Develop, and was nominated for five awards at the 9th British Academy Video Games Awards (BAFTA). The following year, Gone Home, a walking simulator developed by a team responsible for the acclaimed BioShock 2 DLC “Minerva’s Den,” would receive several accolades including Polygon’s Game of the Year, as well as a BAFTA for “Best Debut Game.” The following year, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, yet another walking simulator, would receive a BAFTA nomination for “Best Debut Game” and would win the award for Game Innovation. In less than three years, the walking simulator genre went from practical obscurity to dependable award winner.

_____

In stark terms, a walking simulator is the antithesis of a traditional video game. In fact, I hesitate to even classify walking simulators as games, though I will do so here to keep things simple. Strictly speaking, a game requires both a win condition and a lose condition. When experiencing a walking simulator, you win and lose only in the sense that you could win reading a book or lose visiting a museum, which is to say you can’t.

Given the genre’s quick rise and foreign sensibilities, it’s understandable why walking simulators were originally dismissed by some gamers. Gamers had been nurtured to expect conventional games with binary outcomes. The very origins of the video game are rooted in this strict dichotomy. Video games were born of military and sports sensibilities and with them, the binary success/failure states that war and sports assume. In 1958, Physicist William Higinbotham created what is generally considered the very first video game, a Pong precursor called Tennis for Two. Four years later, Spacewar! was released. Sports and war. Win and lose. True and false. Simple for both humans and computers to grasp.[6]

Limited computing power made such binary states the only practical means of play. Early computers didn’t have the luxury of abundant memory and processing power to allow for nuance in world-building and player choice. Even if games did have that ability, the noisy bar environment where arcade machines became popular wouldn’t have been conducive to exploring story and empathy in the way modern games, especially walking simulators, can. Early arcade cabinets needed to be profitable to garner further investment. It’s hard to imagine players eagerly inserting quarters to hear the next line of emotionally fraught dialogue in the same way they would to buy another chance to shoot enemy ships for a high score.

Over the years, as computers became cheaper and game engines became more easily available, the barrier of entry for budding game developers lowered. In the same way that widespread literacy leads to evolution in literary genres, widespread gaming literacy means a similar evolution in game genres. Originally, Atari’s early games used color-coded retail boxes to designate genres. Orange meant racing games, yellow for sports games, red was reserved for arcade/action games, and so on. This system was doomed to fail amid the industry’s maturation. As genres crossed and melded over the subsequent decades, the clean box-spine rainbow would surely have eventually muddied, making the color-coded system unsustainable and irrelevant.

This focus on experience over leaderboards makes the walking simulator a genre uniquely primed to offer compelling narrative as its primary motivation, one where family dynamics can be explored now like bullet dynamics have in the past.

No matter where you land on the term, the “walking simulator” and its gameplay tropes have become embraced by players and the games industry, meaning a game like What Remains of Edith Finch, a game once impossible to fathom, actually stood a chance of succeeding.

_____

Ian Dallas describes What Remains of Edith Finch as a collection of short stories about a cursed family in Washington state. You play as Edith, one of the only remaining Finches, returning to your childhood home to learn more about the tragic and often sudden deaths in your family. As if this simple premise doesn’t describe the family clearly enough: the Finches are a unique family.

Stories of a family curse date back to before the Finches settled in America. Edith’s great-great-grandfather, Odin, fled Norway with his daughter (Edie), her husband (Sven), and their daughter (Molly), hoping to escape the curse. Not willing to abandon his homeland entirely, he brings the physical house with him. This image—a fully constructed, two-story brick house sailing across the sea—is endearingly absurd and encapsulates the Finch family ethos. A refusal to abandon the past while trying to escape its pull permeates the player’s entire 2–3-hour gameplay time.

But sadly, Odin would not land in America alive. His family’s floating Norway home sank just off the shore of Orcas Island in Washington state, leading to Odin’s death. The rest of the family survived.

Ten years later, one of the survivors, young Molly Finch, would turn into a shark.

Don’t worry reader. I’ll help you understand.

Three: Surrounded by the Magical and the Surreal

“And suddenly I was a shark!”

-Molly Finch

Every great video game has a water level, even if that level contains no actual water.

At the most basic level of game design conversation, a video game’s description can be reduced to a collection of verbs, and the gameplay is in part the result of those verbs. Mario can jump. But what does jumping allow him to do? Stomp on enemies. Cross gaps between platforms. Break bricks to gain power-ups or to access alternate level routes. When these verbs are suddenly replaced with an unfamiliar set of abilities or are forced into an unfamiliar environment, that’s when you’ve entered a “water level,” a situation where an abrupt change in spatial awareness or movement options forces the player to rethink how to interact with the game. The water levels in Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System are literally levels in which Mario, the quintessential and originally-named Jump Man, is stripped of his jumping abilities, and instead forced to tame buoyancy in an alien underwater environment.[7] The player is now dodging—not stomping on—enemies, and where falling and rising were equally controllable on land, the underwater friction makes sinking much slower than swimming upwards. The game developers are warning the player against comfort. This game, the developers might say, won’t hesitate to pull the rug out from under you. [8]

But a water level isn’t always a water level. It can be a space level within an otherwise terrestrial game. It can be a flying level within an otherwise terrestrial game. It can be a wacky, upside down, reverse gravity level in an otherwise, well, terrestrial game. The water level inverts the player’s expectations, and what the player expects is often a world analogous in many ways to our own real, terrestrial world. Humans[9] approach playing games and designing games via human sensibilities meaning a physics rule, such as gravity, is expected to be a constant, default experience. When we press the jump button, we expect the player character to return to the ground plane. The return may be softened by a jetpack or extended by a double-jump, for example, but the return will happen.[10] Obviously, some games do present alternative default in-game states, but if the player avatar is human-like and the environment Earth-like, then the verbs offered will most likely be familiar to Earth-dwelling humans.

A water level can be simultaneously frightening and interesting to a player, much like real water can be to a game designer.

_____

“[What Remains of Edith Finch] originally started off as a scuba diving simulator.” Ian Dallas tells me this without even a pause allowed for revelation or awe. My surprised response, “really?” doesn’t merit a comment from him. He’s told this origin story too many times to other fans and journalists. I like to think that the jump from scuba diving simulator to cursed family is such a logical leap in Ian’s head that to be impressed would be to question the game’s very existence. Of course, it started as a scuba simulator. An adult starts as a baby. A tree starts as a seed. A mountain starts when tectonic plates overlap. And What Remains of Edith Finch starts as a scuba diving simulator. A thing is that thing because of the things before.

Ian wanted What Remains of Edith Finch to evoke a sense of the sublime. Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz in a 2017 interview he says, “For me the clearest memory of [experiencing the sublime] was scuba diving as a kid and seeing the bottom of the ocean slope away into a seemingly infinite darkness.” I can relate … in theory. I’m from Kansas, where no coast is natural, and the deepest trenches still flirt with human toes. The idea of a bottomless maw is more horror than sublime, but I suppose if I try hard enough, I can imagine trusting the buoyancy of water and its assumedly benign creatures enough to fake a sense of awe amid my panic. Almost.

Why are water environments so jarring and, for some, so evocative? Simply put, oceans—and the life they contain—are naturally problematic for humans. Ocean life is a reclusive neighbor, approachable but forever mysterious. More than 80 percent of the ocean has never been seen by humans. Absolute comfort with such a staggering unknown is impossible. The waves, tides, and currents are gods we know exist but exist without motive. That’s terrifying. Even innocuous creatures at the surface mock us. Jellyfish, kelp, squid, and dolphins all embrace the same currents that would drown us. We sink. They dance.

I am most comfortable sitting in a coffee shop, not floating in water. How easy would it be for a shark to eat me underwater? Very. Conversely, imagine how easy it would be to punch a shark trapped in a Starbucks. The power works both ways, sure, but there are far fewer dead sharks in a Starbucks than dead humans in the ocean.[11]

The ocean forces me to accept the inability to retreat. Where gravity and friction allow me to run on land, these very same forces act against me underwater. I am forced to trust foreign, disinterested forces, and what’s scarier than trusting something without motive?

Where the potential for death collides with an awareness of our insignificance along with the acceptance of both, that’s where you’ll find the sublime. That’s where you’ll find the seed of what would become What Remains of Edith Finch, a place of awe and discomfort.

_____

A video game player is both primed to embrace change and is also governed by the game’s rules. We aren’t just people staring at a screen the way we do with movies or the way readers stare at paper. We’re connected by an input device, one that maps our thoughts to the actions we see. As we press buttons, the feedback changes our approach, our input changes, and the loop continues until we arrive at a win state. No other entertainment medium offers this level of malleability. No other entertainment medium wants us to stretch and shape the product to an end while the product stretches and shapes us to that same end. This reciprocal molding is what makes video games uniquely immersive. Now, imagine being immersed in a wholly uncomfortable world. Scary.

Those underwater feelings of spatial disorientation, vertigo, and compromised proprioception (your body’s ability to know its location in space) can be important game design tools to make ocean environments so upsetting to players. To give games a sense of physical space when floating, underwater game environments provide terrestrial anchors—corals, rooted plant life, and sunken ships (with human skeletons trapped inside, of course). To see a reef remain static as your character drifts away enhances the feeling of weightlessness. But to some players, this sensory dissonance may cause vertigo. When my brain receives conflicting stimuli, the result is dizziness, vomiting, and the inability to play the open-world, deep-sea survival game Subnautica. Motion sickness in this video game sense is the same as real-life motion sickness when riding in a boat. The horizon stays still (brain: “cool, I’m not moving”), while the boat rocks to the ocean below (brain: “wait, so I AM moving?”).[12]

But the most effective, discomforting ocean environments that video games achieve happens when the ocean is delivered alongside non-ocean environments. A player begins a game on land and is given time to acclimate. Despite the inclusion of post-apocalyptic environments or futuristic weapons, those game worlds often mirror the real world in all the important ways. Gravity? Check. Friction? Check. Oxygen? Check. But game developers need to provide players with unique experiences, and sometimes that means yanking away the stability they’ve taken for granted. Sometimes that means exchanging verbs, from Jump Man to Swim Man, so to speak.

On the surface,[13] this sublime tension between natural human-in-water psychology and perceived underwater dangers promises a great gaming experience, so Ian Dallas and his company, Giant Sparrow, went to work building a Caleb J. Ross nightmare creator (ie, scuba diving simulator). But “when we started working on the game,” Ian continues with Gamesindustry.biz, “we found it got kind of dull after a couple of minutes.” Speaking to Edge in the July 2017 issue, Ian elaborates, “It’s really hard to tell a story while scuba diving … like, who is talking? What are the stakes? What’s the ticking clock? All these things that any story has to grapple with were hard to do.”

It’s worth taking a moment to study Ian’s concerns. His weren’t gameplay concerns. Ian was worried about telling a good story. This prioritization shows just how far video games have come as an entertainment medium. During gaming’s infancy, a focus on story over gameplay was laughable. John Carmack, co-founder of id Software and lead programmer of the early Doom games, famously said, “story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” Context is key, of course; Doom was a first-person shooter series that consciously avoided empathy. Story wasn’t absent or unimportant in all video games, but the sentiment that most gameplay didn’t need narrative motivation was pervasive. Even a long-running adventure series that is now bloated with lore, the Legend of Zelda was released in 1987 with only a brief single-screen written narrative tease to introduce the game. And this tease was, of course, skippable by the player.

I cannot blame early game developers for dismissing narrative. With less than 10kb of memory to play with (as was common during the 1980s, especially when developing for consoles) developers were forced to sacrifice narrative ornamentation like unnecessary text, cutscenes, and dialog trees. Consider this: in modern versions of Microsoft Word, a single-page document is bigger than 10kb. While emotional investment can carry a player through a story and help to earn a satisfying payoff, explosions, and blood can do the same.[14] Goodbye story.

Things have changed since the release of the original Doom games. Story has become a selling point for many big-budget franchises with Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption, God of War, and The Last of Us being especially high-profile examples. But even with these games, the story is often made to supplement the game’s more tactile core gameplay. Rare is the level of success with a game like What Remains of Edith Finch where story is the guiding focus.

_____

As Ian Dallas turned away from his sociopathic dream of submerging human avatars underwater,[15] he mined elsewhere for tonal direction that would help him deliver the sublime. Given that scuba diving makes for difficult storytelling, where could Ian turn to bring What Remains of Edith Finch to land? He would find direction with a fiction genre called weird fiction, a subgenre of speculative fiction, whose tone epitomizes feelings of the impossible and the overwhelming. He would be especially inspired by writers from the mid-19th and early-20th centuries. Specific influences Ian often cites are Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, the pioneer and the face of the genre, respectively.

What makes weird fiction so ripe to deliver the sublime experiences that Ian wanted with What Remains of Edith Finch? Lovecraft himself answers this by offering his definition of weird fiction in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”:

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

Basically, Lovecraft is saying here that the unknown is more unsettling than the known, and the possibility of “becoming its subject” (ie, it’s after you!) makes the unknown terrifying while keeping it innately intriguing. This is a far cry from the traditional monsters, murder, and blood tropes of horror (though Lovecraft did use monsters often, especially tentacle monsters). And in being so removed, the weird fiction genre is free to explore psychology over physicality while still leveraging morbid fascination. Simply stated, weird fiction exists specifically to deliver the sublime. What Remains of Edith Finch oozes Lovecraftian inspiration, from the first silhouette shot of the Finch home’s surreal architecture to the more direct use of a tentacle monster in the game’s first playable story (which I’ll explore in depth later).

So we’ve got our tone for the game, but what about its structure?

_____

Let’s travel a full continent away from the American Northeast homeland of Lovecraft and Poe to South America where a writer named Gabriel Garcia Márquez popularized a genre of fiction called magical realism. In simple terms, magical realism treats the magical as real. What would seem strange and otherworldly to the reader outside the context of the narrative is often treated as mundane within the context of the narrative. For example, in Garcia Márquez’s story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (a title, characteristic of its genre, dismisses poetry for practicality) a very old man with enormous wings is found in a family’s courtyard. The family is more concerned about the presence of the man than the presence of his wings. This affords the story a shortcut to exploring family dynamics as the reader is primed to look for something deeper (because what kind of people wouldn’t be interested in those enormous wings? Strange people, maybe).

Literary critic Michael Bell offers a way to frame the genre better for our purposes when discussing What Remains of Edith Finch. “What is really at stake is a psychological suppleness which is able to inhabit unsentimentally the daytime world while remaining open to the promptings of those domains which modern culture has, by its own inner logic, necessarily marginalised or repressed.” Magical realism allows us to accept the strangeness of a strange world. This is a frame that Garcia Márquez himself might agree with. Here is an exchange between Garcia Márquez and his friend Plinio Apuelyo regarding how people are unwilling to expand their concept of reality:

Apuelyo: The way you treat reality in your books … has been called magical realism. I have the feeling your European readers are usually aware of the magic of your stories but fail to see the reality behind it…

Garcia Márquez: This is surely because their rationalism prevents them seeing that reality isn’t limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs.

Great-grandma Edie, What Remains of Edith Finch’s closest stand-in for an antagonist, promotes this same challenge to a common reality. This is the logic that allows her to claim that a dragon killed her husband (a dragon-shaped children’s slide fell on him), and to tell local newspapers that a mole man lives below her home (her son Walter lives in an underground bunker). This is the logic that allows Molly (Great-grandma Edie’s daughter), the first Finch death we explore, to state so matter-of-factly: “and suddenly I was a shark.”

Giant Sparrow’s first game, The Unfinished Swan, began development with little more than what Ian Dallas describes as “an abstract but describable goal.” The team’s goal was to create a sense of awe and wonder. Such a goal allowed them to aim in unison and follow a shared trajectory, despite not knowing exactly what they would ultimately create. For What Remains of Edith Finch, the studio’s follow-up, Ian took a similar approach with the abstract but describable goal of creating a sense of natural, sublime horror. The first image that coalesced the team around this goal: a shark falling from the sky into a forest.

When the player character literally transforms from a flying owl into a falling shark, I am forced to adopt Great-grandma Edie’s/Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s logic as well.[16] Reality isn’t just the price of tomatoes and eggs. I choose to walk into the strange house, but I don’t choose to transform into a shark. This moment, about 30 minutes into the game, is arguably the true start of any What Remains of Edith Finch journey and the first of the game’s many water levels.

Until this shark-falling visual, I could rightly dismiss the strangeness of Molly’s transformations as impressionistic interpretations. At this point in the game, 10-year-old Molly is hungry after having been sent to bed without supper, and so she imagines herself as a series of animals on the prowl for food. She transforms into a cat because cats climb trees and eat birds. She transforms into an owl because owls fly and eat rabbits. But when we see a shark flopping down a dry-land hill, tangling itself amid tree trunks en route to a river below, I can no longer credit metaphor. The divide between the real world—albeit a strange world—of the Finch home and the mythology Edie has insisted upon is breached. Here is where I must first accept the schism between realities that the game tightropes for its duration. The blended reality that this shark has created is my new reality, a reality not limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs.

Magical realism is the palette from which the broad strokes of the game can be painted, and not surprisingly, the artist that both mixed this palette and provided an outline for the game’s structure is one and the same. It was Garcia Márquez’s book One Hundred Years of Solitude that would have the biggest impact on the game’s generational narrative structure.

_____

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the Buendía family over seven generations, focusing on their involvement with the founding and legacy of a town called Macondo. Macondo was built in the utopian image of the family patriarch José Arcadio Buendía following a night in which he dreamed of an island town made of mirrors. Macondo remains isolated from outside influence for many years—aside from an annual visit from a band of Roma[17]—during which the town and its residents experience many unusual events, not unlike the misfortunes experienced by the Finch family.

Parallels abound. The island town of Macondo reflects the secluded Finch family home on Orcas Island. Social isolation is common between the two stories, and therefore the disposition toward magical realist explanations for misfortunes will inevitably percolate. And while the technologies shared by the Roma aren’t the same as the food shared by the one Chinese restaurant that would still deliver to the Finch home, the limited influence from the outside world is notably common.[18]

Evolution, though, requires outside influence. Without random genetic mutations, without the introduction of non-familial DNA, a species—a family—suffers. This isn’t to suggest that the Finches are incestuous, but that they are similarly gated from potential by being subject to the limited teachings of a cloistered family. Drip in some poisoned Kool-Aid and the Finches aren’t far removed from being a cult.

This isn’t hyperbole. Though a cult often has religious connotations, a cult is further defined by its relatively small group size, its shared beliefs, and its leader who prescribes those shared beliefs, which people outside the cult interpret as sinister and strange. Sinister and strange though it can be, a cult can also be intriguing to outsiders. Charismatic leaders solicit and retain followers while spectators look on with curiosity. But staying within the geographic and idealistic confines of a cult does not make for an engaging story. A good story needs conflict, and a cult story fundamentally lacks conflict if told within its own idyllic context. Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love works because the Binewski family knows how to sell themselves to outsiders. Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor works because one member of the cult rises to celebrity status outside the cult. One Hundred Years of Solitude knew this as well, and so it spends much of its text exploring the personal narratives of those Buendía family descendants who left Macondo. What Remains of Edith Finch would do the same by putting the player in the shoes of Edith as she toggles alignment between the cult leader (her great-grandmother, Edie) and one of its escapees (her mother, Dawn).

Ian had his tone, he had his structure, he had the beginnings of a family, and now he needed a house to put them all inside.

Dear Christopher #2

Dear Christopher,

Do you ever wonder what the curse is? Your mother wasn’t sure if it even existed, but to first measure existence, don’t we first need to at least throw a few words at it until a definition of sorts starts to form?

I’ll go first: Norse magic. I admit, all I know of Norse tradition and Norse mythology is what I’ve scraped from enemy design and set pieces built to fill out the God of War and Hellblade games. Adopting an interpretation from an interpretation from an interpretation seems disingenuous, even dangerous, but perhaps that’s what playing around with a curse is. Maybe your great-great-greats knew better than to define the indefinable and so decided to escape it instead. Cue Odin’s boat. Cue Odin’s floating home. Cue Odin’s death.

I don’t know if I believe in magic. Sure, magic might just be science or circumstance we don’t yet understand, but to call it magic feels like an artificial barrier to keep science from happening. Once you name a thing, it’s impossible to unname that thing.

Maybe that was your Great-great-grandmother Edie’s intent. If she stakes claim to a definition, then she can guide its impact. Who among us hasn’t witnessed death? And who among us hasn’t felt obligated to explain away our proximity to it?

Years ago, Waco, Texas, the sun high and angry, somewhere above the city, stuck in traffic at the peak of a highway interchange ramp, I sat in the backseat of a rented blue sedan, eager to get to the airport for a flight back to Kansas City where I’d land in the dark, drive home in the dark, and only then escape into my bed. We—me, my boss, and my co-worker—had just left a meeting with a long-time client, a meeting that to my recollection, ended in tepid, obligatory handshakes and a stack of new nonsense requests that I’d have to somehow honor before our next meeting. The summer humidity weakened the car’s air conditioning to a hot, moist current that failed to release my wet shirt from my skin or detach my neck from the seat’s headrest. The infinite line of cars in front of us and the infinite line of cars behind us conspired to keep us distant from our safe homes and cool pillows. The entire world hated me. If not for our position at the apex of this ramp, dozens of feet above the ground, and the hopeful horizon I was fortunate enough to see, I might have considered walking to the airport. What was keeping us here!?

A car accident, it turned out. And its victim had escaped.

Up ahead, where the road’s return curve toward the earth began, I saw movement. Too isolated to be our chain of cars finally shifting forward, but movement still. A head, I saw, bobbing only slightly, buoyed by legs that lacked clear direction. This body’s mission was defined—walk up the interchange ramp—but its mechanism faltered, a broken brain, legs confused. The wobbling body blurred behind a curtain of heat waves, but as the body drew closer to us, the curtain parted. The head revealed itself, covered in blood, and there in the middle of the muddy red, two holes of white poked through with pupils darting chaotically like they were searching desperately for something to latch onto, something to bring their body back under control. I wonder if I remember those eyes so clearly because maybe I failed those eyes; I thought maybe I should have been what they grabbed onto.

But the body passed our car. I turned to watch its continued lumber along the line of stalled cars. The back of its head was dark red like the front but was missing its two white balls of hope. To my mind, after I could no longer reach those eyes, the body was doomed. Then, the body steered toward the concrete barrier that separated our elevated ramp from the open air. The body bent over the barrier and threw itself down. I didn’t see it hit the ground below, 25 feet at least, but what else could it have done?

Your Great-great-grandmother Edie might say that he never hit the ground.

The next day, back at my cubicle at work, I found a news story about the event. The article claimed the man was taken to a nearby hospital with possible head and ankle injuries. The story didn’t confirm survival, nor did it confirm death. Its details were sparse and obligatory. Your Great-great-grandmother Edie would have no room for this story on her wall. I was compelled to explain away my proximity to the event by establishing my place within it. I emailed the news station with a summary of what I had witnessed, but I couldn’t be satisfied with a simple rote translation. Instead, I played a role I assumed every news station went gaga over: the stereotypical, impassioned but illiterate, hick of my childhood. My message to the news station read:

This was crazy. I seed it yesterday. I was on the bridge when he jumped. At first I thoughted it was a drunk. He was wobblin all to and fro in the left lane of the ramp. I even took my phone out and recorded a bit of it. But then I noticed he was bleedin from the head, so I turned my phone off. I didn’t want to record that. I think he wasn’t drunk but maybe just disoriented. just a few seconds later he climbed over the edge and dropped.

The people from the other car (I thinked they was from the other car in the wreck) seed him fall and were screaming “he’s not moving. He’s not moving.”

I received a polite response from the news station. Nothing more. My brother-in-law, who has won Emmy Awards for his evening news production work (not in Waco, Texas) told me that my email likely didn’t stir a single reporter. News stations get comments like mine all the time. They probably didn’t actually read my email.

To be rejected by a death that my dumb self thought I was, I don’t know, maybe honoring, is a strange feeling. I didn’t know why I felt I needed to claim I was there. I didn’t know why I felt I needed to force my view through such a lens. Why did I turn that man’s death into my almost-death?

Having since met your Great-great-grandmother Edie, I think I’m starting to understand that it’s natural to stake claim to another person’s death. That’s how many of us continue living. Like how food isn’t for the chef. Like how birth isn’t for the child. Like how a funeral isn’t for the dead.

What do you think, Christopher? What do you think the curse is? Is it magic? Is it perhaps just the need to steal other people’s deaths? Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe the curse is like a residue, something that’s attached to something else. I’ve heard some people say the Finch house is cursed and the Finches are just unfortunate victims. Odin brought the cursed house to America. Then, when the new Finch house was built on the shore of Orcas Island, its fireplace was built with bricks from the cursed house, bringing the residue into a new vessel. I hope it’s not all that. A house is an important foundation. It would be a shame to be uncomfortable in your own house.

Your friend,

Caleb

Four: Welcome to the Hub World

“The passages were a pretty tight fit. They’d obviously been built for smaller hands and bellies.”

-Edith Finch

For as defiant a gameplay experience as What Remains of Edith Finch appears to be, it is still a video game. And video games are designed not solely around a team’s creative impulses but also around the collective players’ uncreative expectations. As mentioned in Chapter Three, much as Earth-dwelling human players may expect Earth-dwelling human gravity game environments, adventure game players also have expectations for logical environmental progression. Stages within levels within a hub world. To deviate too far from this convention is to risk offending players with decades worth of expectations set by proven game design.

With What Remains of Edith Finch, the expected role of the hub world map is filled by the house itself. The expected role of the levels is filled by the bedrooms within. And the expected role of the battles is filled by the Finch deaths I explore within each level. Given this perspective, this first-person, narrative-heavy, walking simulator is structurally a top-down JRPG[19] with a hub world, a few towns, and some monster-filled dungeons.[20]

As I explore Edith’s hub world she comments on the house’s atypical architecture. She says that when she was a child “the house made me uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t put into words.” Approaching the house now, as a 17-year-old, with several years acclimatized to the wider world, she’s able to define her discomfort. “I was afraid of the house,” she says, simply. Who wouldn’t be? Even beyond the psychic residue left abandoned in the fossilized air, the physical structure of the house itself exists as an anti-house, where in lieu of comfort and safety the house offers only sorrow and unrest. But though the house rejects being a home, the promise of home still lingers.

Edith’s reactions are reasonable given her seven-year absence, where she learned that her home, her family, and her childhood weren’t what most children experience. Edith herself, upon returning from her imposed seven-year exile states “as a kid I just assumed every house had peepholes and sealed rooms you weren’t allowed inside of.”

These strange features of the house—hidden locks and sealed bedrooms with reverse peepholes drilled into the doors—aren’t just intriguing game design quirks meant to entice players into progress. These features are, narratively, statements of defiance in a generational war of escalation between Great-grandma Edie and Dawn, Edith’s mother. Edie teaches the idea of a family curse while Dawn wants only to dismiss the curse entirely. These cordoned-off, monster-filled dungeon bedrooms are boss battle arenas patiently awaiting the player’s arrival.

To her end, Great-grandma Edie Finch believes in the curse so fully that she doesn’t allow bedrooms to be reused. Instead, after each death, the room is repurposed as a shrine to the deceased, a way to memorialize in the very name of the curse. Every birth and every marriage sprout new rickety staircases leading to narrow antechambers that bloom into unstable bedrooms. The house itself is like a tree with a node for each doomed Finch soul. Edie refuses to empty out the bedrooms after each Finch death, despite the growing number of Finch family descendants who need bedrooms.

So, Dawn, to her own end, seals the rooms to render these shrines meaningless. Full-width wooden latches barricade most doors, and where this proved insufficient, the remaining gaps have been filled with polyurethane foam sealant. Edie then retaliates by installing peepholes—in reverse to allow viewing from the outside-in—to win back a small degree of access to the shrines. Imagine being Edith, for the first time realizing that the peepholes and sealed doors are not adornments of a normal childhood; they are weapons.

This is the war Edith endured as a child, a fight for rights to the curse. One side demands worship while the other demands distance. And here, these seven years later, Edith arrives as an arbitrator to hunt for sense between the two warring factions. And like any good arbitrator, just minutes after condemning the home for its warped architecture and history, she softens: “Nothing in the house looked abnormal,” she admits. “There was just too much of it, like a smile with too many teeth.” She’s caught between generations, caught between pride and admonishment.

Epistolary remembrances—journals, letters, and poems—provide access to each dungeon/death story. Upon investigating each of these artifacts, I am taken back in time to inhabit the body of the soon-to-be deceased Finch as they live out their final moments. The first Finch death I experience is Molly’s death. And Molly is hungry.

_____

Molly’s journal, dated December 13th, 1947, opens with, “Dear Diary, I will be gone soon, but I wanted to tell somebody about what’s gonna happen. It started when Mom sent me to bed without dinner. I woke up and I was starving. So I looked around for something to eat.”

I then guide Molly through her bedroom on a hunt for food. The Halloween candy bucket sits empty. The gerbil’s food bowl offers a few pellets. Molly’s pet goldfish is appetizing, though Molly ultimately passes on the meal. Molly eventually enters the en-suite bathroom where she eats an entire tube of toothpaste and a handful of holly berries. Still not satisfied, Molly moves to the open window where a barn swallow rests within arm’s reach. Intent on eating the bird, Molly climbs through the window onto a tree branch. Molly’s transition from indoors to outdoors covers the first literal transformation of this first level: Molly becomes a cat and chases the bird as it hops among the tree branches.

Other transformations follow. Molly becomes an owl hunting rabbits, then a shark hunting seals, and finally a giant tentacle sea monster hunting sailors before I return her to her bedroom where she dies.

The cause of death isn’t so simple. Clues are peppered throughout the playable story. Molly quips that she “promised dad I wouldn’t climb [the tree] anymore,” alluding to familiarity with this danger, and while holly berries aren’t deadly if ingested, they are poisonous and can cause vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, and drowsiness. A disoriented child high up in a tree seems a logical premise for a falling death.[21] But as with all the deaths to follow, the cause of Molly’s death is never definitively stated. The player is consistently abandoned in a logic limbo, where the warring factions of science and myth each tease out their own conclusions. Does a fall from the tree kill her? Do the toothpaste and holly berries poison her? Or does an actual tentacle monster eat her? No Finch death is clinical.

But with Dawn having sealed the doors, what kind of Boss Key[22], Blue Spade key[23], nonsense riddle[24], or soul artifact[25] do I need to open the way into Molly’s room?

_____

Dawn’s barricades persist these seven years later. Just before Dawn died, she gifted Edith a key. While the goal of Edith’s journey home is to investigate the family curse, the impetus is this key and Edith’s drive to discover what it unlocks. Edith quickly fells the usual suspects. The front door? No. The garage door? No. The basement door? No.

I guide Edith deeper. A series of blocked doors and dead ends eventually forces me to an unsealed bedroom at the far end of the house’s second story. It’s the only unsealed bedroom. Its walls are painted to look like an undersea diorama. I insert the key hesitantly, ready for the tumbler’s rejection. But no! Success! The key unlocks this padlocked passageway bridging this ocean-themed room to Molly’s room.

This unsealed room is devoid of furniture but retains its unique wall art. The walls have been painted to resemble the bottom of the ocean. The sandy wooden floor bleeds up to a light blue perimeter, the two colors swirling together as the current from a passing family of illustrated sharks agitates the world. The blue continues upward, passing the eye line, to encompass the entire ceiling. Standing inside the room feels like standing at the bottom of the ocean. And breathing here in this undersea imitation feels impossible, like I should be dead.

This ocean surrounding can’t be a simple aesthetic choice. I refuse to accept triviality here. The game’s conception began in the ocean after all, when Ian Dallas experienced his own real-life, water level while scuba diving.

_____

Upon closing Molly’s diary in which the young girl claims to have been eaten by a monster, Edith says aloud, “I’m not sure if I believed all of that. But I’m sure Edie would have.” Edith’s words here, and throughout the game, aren’t just character-building flavor text like I’d expect to read alongside most in-game items from most video games. If I agree that the player goal of What Remains of Edith Finch is narrative conclusion and that progress is encouraged by narrative confirmation, then Edith’s commentary becomes an important game mechanic.

This commentary is the walking simulator version of contextual feedback found in other gaming genres. Where the click of an empty magazine in a run-and-gun shooter may alert the player to reload, Edith’s observations similarly tell me to pay attention lest progress be impossible. I could choose not to reload a gun, or I could choose not to heed Edith’s observations, but that’s a choice deviation from the game’s intent, an artificial restriction, the equivalent of playing the game blindfolded.

Without the commentary, the house is just an old building rotting away in just another secluded patch of overgrowth. Without the commentary, the house is just a frontier remnant, just a relic reserved for local historians, just a landmark to be forgotten. But when Edith speaks, the house comes alive.[26] Her speech is necessary signposting to encourage my proper navigation through the many rooms and secret passageways, but such overt direction wasn’t initially welcomed during development. Speaking to Rock Paper Shotgun, Lead Designer Chris Bell opens up about the difficult balance between affording player agency and avoiding player frustration. “At any point the player could start flailing and asking what happens now, so it was really important for every story to constantly have a sense of progression, having that narration there to catch you to say, ‘No, this way, come forward, you’re doing the right thing.’ It let people get comfortable with the controls and trusting that what they were doing was the right thing.”

For a game so intent on player discovery, literally writing out the player direction on the walls was uncomfortable but necessary for Ian Dallas. Also speaking to Rock Paper Shotgun, he says “we were backed into having the text in the world as a really convenient stopgap solution for how to signal to the player all of the things we need to.”

This highlights an interesting tension that happens when a video game eschews traditional gameplay mechanics but at the same time wants to be sold and discussed as a video game. A game designer must embrace convention but keep the product distant enough that it’s able to thrive within its own marketing narrative. Allow too much distance and the designer risks alienating the very players they hope will buy and enjoy the product. Adopt too much conventional gameplay and the designer might as well place floating bananas or coins throughout the game world to lead the player Donkey Kong Country-style while arcade HUD[27] elements flash according to progress.

With What Remains of Edith Finch I forgive much of this overt direction because the direction itself is often inoffensive; it limits non-text visual prompts to small glowing dots and book-shaped icons that appear only when contextually relevant. Furthermore, the use of text prompts is justified given the game’s journal motif. Edith’s words on the walls aren’t directing me, they are teaching me about the character I embody, thus allowing me to direct myself.

Edith is my conduit, and so she is my interpretation of the events (and later commentary from other family members act as conduits into their own stories). The family deaths, the plausibility of the curse, and even the construction of the house itself, these events are all filtered through Edith.

At this point in the game, I am becoming aware of the various characters’ alignment with archetypes. Edith is my unreliable narrator (unreliable as all first-person narrators are). She fuels tension between Dawn (the stable mentor) and Great-grandmother Edie (the antagonist). So, who then is my hero protagonist? Interestingly, he’s been with me since the beginning, always on Edith’s mind, but most players wouldn’t have noticed.

Edith’s quips often serve dual purposes: I learn of Edith’s own hesitations to believe in a family curse, but I also pick up on just how futile it is to escape the curse. When Edith tells me that the house is her inheritance, I’m to believe she speaks of a literal transition of ownership but also a transition of what the home represents and with it any curse that may be tethered to it. In the case of Edith’s commentary during her irreversible[28] crossing of the threshold via the garage’s doggie door, I’m meant to pick up on the wistful small talk any budding adult might say of their younger, smaller bodies, but the attentive player will take this as a reference to Edith’s pregnancy: “crawling through the doggie door used to be a lot easier when I was eleven.” When I wasn’t carrying a 22-week fetus inside me.

Introducing our hero protagonist, Christopher Finch.

Dear Christopher #3

Dear Christopher,

When your mother carried you through the doggie door, it was I who carried her through. A frame within a frame within a frame. I was you. I was her. I was me. Three stories. All true.

Do you play video games, Christopher? Your mother, when she was young, would play video games with your Uncle Lewis. According to your mother, Lewis wasn’t very skilled. “He died a lot,” she said. I often play games with my own son, Jude. He, like your Uncle Lewis did, dies a lot.

Jude is a great kid. He just turned ten. You’d like him. He’s always sniffing the air for a punchline. He’s in the pun phase, one of the most reachable branches on the comedy tree, perhaps only slapstick and farts being lower. Say anything to him and expect a few seconds of silence as he hunts your words for a vulnerability, a homonym he can contort, a twist-of-phrase he can exploit. We think alike, so in this game he’s been playing, Minecraft, when he says, “I died,” I respond, “that’s a shame. Now I have to figure out what to do with your bedroom.” He rolls his eyes.

He’s maturing within the pun phase enough to recognize its ease, and therefore to dismiss it with an exhausted eyeroll (but let it be known that an eye-roll is also a tacit admission of failure, of the inability to respond with a better joke). But the exchange didn’t simply settle after that. It stayed with me. Maybe the pun residue slickened my synapses just enough to trip deeper into the implications of his statement, “I died.” The implication that roleplaying can be so quick, so natural, that jokes can be layered upon the act even as the act itself is unfolding. Jokes are a culture’s recognition of itself as a natural, yet improvable, system. Joking about “I died” recognizes how natural it has become to imbue a video game avatar with a sense of self; or, perhaps more revelatory, to imbue yourself with a sense of the video game avatar. Jude died. My son died. Minecraft Steve died. Three stories. All true.

Video games get blamed for a lot of society’s ills, but I believe their capacity to bend one’s identity offers a practical hope. See, the “I” avatar has dulled the rigid structures of self. When it becomes commonplace to say “I” but reference another entity entirely, it then becomes commonplace to understand that “I” isn’t a singular, universally defined thing. While it’s not new to suggest that we understand the value of individuality, it is new that everyone, even staunch opponents of a blurred line, can so easily adopt a blurred line. When a dog person plays a cat game, that person’s facets multiply. When a bigot plays an RPG as a character they’d despise in real life , an angel gets its wings. Adopting a new self, even in the ephemeral world of video games where aesthetic decisions are often guided by mechanical necessity, means, at the very least, a recognition that alternate selves are possible.

If you don’t play video games, Christopher, I recommend you give them a go. Imagine who you might be tomorrow. Imagine how many frames you might be able to look through someday.

Your friend,

Caleb

Five: Welcome Christopher

“What kind of family finishes building a cemetery before starting the house?”

-Edith Finch

Pregnancy in a story is like a gun in a story: it’s simply too powerful.

Characters pump blood into a deserving story, but arm that character with a gun, and the blood loses all motivation to keep its body strong. What good is a body when it has a gun to do all the work?

A gun puts too much power into the hands of an undeserving character. A careful reader should register a gun’s sudden appearance in a story as evidence of narrative weakness. A gun is a warning sign, a lazy trick, a phoned-in performance. A bad story made that sudden gun necessary. A gun is a Band-Aid. During an episode of the comedy series The Office titled “Email Surveillance,” Michael Scott—the show’s good-intentioned buffoon—ruins an improv comedy class by pantomiming a gun at every possible opportunity. Not surprisingly, none of his classmates want to be in scenes with him.

Of course, certain genres, such as action movies and war dramas, demand forgiveness. When everything is a gun, the gun is nothing. But outside those exceptions, a gun must be respected. A gun must be earned.

The same is true with a pregnancy.

Imagine two characters who hate each other. One pulls a gun on the other. Suddenly, the entire story is about the gun. Any history these characters had previously been sludging through no longer matters. One character suddenly, unfairly, steals all the power.

Now, imagine these same two characters but rather than revealing a gun, one reveals her pregnancy. Suddenly, the entire story is about the pregnancy. These two characters could be sitting atop a melting glacier, minutes from shark food, and suddenly, with pregnancy robbing the scene, their own imminent death means nothing. Atop the shrinking block of ice these characters no longer fear their own death, they fear their inability to care for the unborn child. Then, a last-minute rescue spawns a shared smile, one that silently commits the two new parents to the health of the child over the second chance they’ve been given to extend their own lives. They could lose legs. They could lose arms. But they have a child, dammit. This is lazy storytelling.

What Remains of Edith Finch understands this power.

Edith’s pregnancy is earned. It’s subtle, existing even before the player has entered the scene, and it’s not overtly referenced until the second half of the game (when Edith says, as she climbs from a derelict treehouse to the second story of the Finch house, along a thin tree branch, “if [Dawn had] told me there’d be so much climbing … I never would have come when I was 22 weeks pregnant.”). Only the careful player, hunting for clues to a mystery that is itself not blatant, might register the pregnancy, might look down to see the baby bump, might discern Edith’s difficulty with passing through the doggie door, or might notice that the body they played as in the game’s open title isn’t Edith’s body. For half of What Remains of Edith Finch the game protects its happy ending, instead letting the story unravel around Edith’s reconciliation of her family’s history.

And I’m comfortable there. I enjoy mining the sublime. So, it’s impressive that when Edith’s pregnancy is revealed, I don’t feel robbed. I don’t see the pregnancy as a sudden gun, as a tool to force a plot. Instead, the pregnancy justifies the entire narrative. I’ve happily rummaged through the Finch family history for over an hour and would have happily rummaged further, but once Edith’s pregnancy is revealed, I realize not only that there is there a way forward beyond the curse, but, hey, I might actually want a way forward. To shape an audience that’s content with an unhappy ending is impressive, but to then shape that audience further by offering a path to an unexpected happy ending is top-tier storytelling.

_____

For a family legacy where every birth is a terminal disease, the youngest generation contains the potential saviors. The Finch family has only one such person. Christopher.

At the start of the game, I’m not Edith. I am Christopher, Edith’s seven-year-old son. But at this point the game isn’t overtly informing me of this relationship. Moments before Edith’s intro at the padlocked gate, I’m playing as just an unimportant child on a boat.

Sitting on the boat, the first-person perspective gives me an opportunity to experiment with the game’s controls, albeit as restricted as they are at this point. I’m allowed at first to just move the camera, to see that I’m sitting at the back end of a ferryboat looking out to the horizon I’ve left, unable to see the horizon I head toward. For all I know, I could be headed for an island prison.[29]

I look down to see a journal and a bouquet of flowers in my lap. Using my casted right arm—at Christopher’s young age, he’s already a daredevil—I open the journal to initiate the real start of the game. I’m now Edith, standing at the start of the cracked asphalt path on the inner-side of the padlocked gate. I can move, and I retain the ability to look in all directions, including down.

Looking down to the ground might not seem like such a big deal, but despite their realistic, free-movement veneers, the legacy of first-person perspective games is one devoid of many freedoms. While great game design and character animation can trick the player into feeling like they are in control of a fully rendered character, first-person games have historically rendered only enough of the player character to project a “good enough” sense of realism.

Processing limitations are abundant and constant in the world of game development. Battles between game programmers and game designers are never-ending. Imagine this: the combat designer requires more enemies on screen. “I want a horde!” she demands. “Okay, but that means the level itself has to be smaller,” says the programmer. “But don’t tell the level designer. He’s already planning for player cues in the far distance to guide progression. He might murder you.” Some say a similar conflict brought down the Roman Empire.[30]

An easy concession with first-person games is to simply not give the player a body. Why tax the computer with arms when doors can simply open as you near them? Why waste memory to store footprints in the snow or to create ripples in the water when the player rarely has a reason to look down, what with the incessant bullets and enemies? So, the player’s entire body gets reduced to just a floating camera.

Some games have fun with this “first-person ghost” trope. The 2011[31] narrative-driven first-person game[32] The Stanley Parable features an unremarkable office-worker as the titular player character. A narrator comments on the player’s actions as the player becomes more self-aware. “And a nagging fear began to creep up in [Stanley’s] mind,” the narrator quips. “Questions that had been there all along; he just hadn’t noticed them yet. For example, why couldn’t he see his feet when he looked down?”

Though What Remains of Edith Finch was released well after game developers grew comfortable with ample processing power to render arms and legs, the novelty of looking down and seeing an actual character body is one many gamers still find joyous. But with What Remains of Edith Finch the lower half of the body is hardly a novelty.

When first in control of Edith, the player could look down and they could notice Edith’s protruding belly, but most players probably won’t. The drive forward toward the strange house in the distance is simply too enticing. In this way, the game designers give the player ample opportunities to begin stitching together fragments of Edith’s history but only insofar as to allow an “ah ha” moment when some of these elements are eventually stated overtly. The game at this point doesn’t want me to know that Edith is pregnant, to realize the danger of a pregnant woman climbing over a flimsy chain link fence, to realize the same about squeezing through a doggie door, or to notice Christopher’s cast and therefore interpret a possible environmental (and intergenerational) disposition toward physical risk. The game doesn’t want me to take all of these character elements and so soon begin breaking down the idea of a curse in favor of the more grounded version: this family simply isn’t wary of danger. Like any great video game, the first level teaches the player everything they need to play the game, and in the case of What Remains Edith Finch everything they need to establish character motivations, the tensions inherent to them, and to encourage narrative discovery. This is a lot to ask of a player, which is why it’s so amazing that none of this needs to be recognized by the player. The player could simply see the cool-looking building in the distance and be driven to move toward it, and the game still works.

The use of the full body also reflects the way Giant Sparrow worked together as a team. As a relatively small group,[33] each team member had an opportunity to contribute in a tangible way. Given the fluid nature of Giant Sparrow’s approach—a shared “abstract but describable goal” to guide development—this meant each team member could potentially influence the game to unexpected degrees. One such unexpected mutation is the full-body player-character model. Ian Dallas told Edge in July 2017: “I’m generally not a fan of bodies in first-person games, particularly feet. But our tech artist Chelsea Hash held onto this dream of being able to show [the protagonist’s] body for so long, and then it was as easy to show it as not.”[34]

The insistence on showing Edith’s body guided my exploration of the game. Not only did the video game historian nerd in me squeal with delight at the simple presence of a body in a first-person game, the game’s family motif forced me to also think harder about why the body—and the visual pregnancy—needed to be there in the first place. What Remains of Edith Finch is a game that hides already subtle worldbuilding further under heaps of distracting outrageousness. The curse, the tentacle monster, a floating house, and later in the game, a death in a fish cannery, and a drowned baby, these are the fireworks that keep players in awe. But beneath these tent-pole images, the inquisitive player will find unassuming, tent-stake depth. What Remains of Edith Finch’s environment and character models perfectly supplement the game’s surface narrative.

Environmental storytelling as a design ethos has been with us for a while, but broke into mainstream prominence with 2007’s BioShock, a first-person shooter game that takes place in a curated underwater utopia-turned-dystopia called Rapture. This otherworldly indoor city is custom-built according to the whims of one man, Andrew Ryan. Here he was to live out his version of an Ayn Rand Objectivist ideal, where citizens are encouraged to forgo altruism in favor of selfishness. Naturally, this goes very wrong. Rapture’s citizens turn violent. The city crumbles. Not at all a bad premise for a video game. But BioShock wants to do more than set a stage for players to shoot through the latest video game version of a zombie apocalypse. BioShock wants the player to ask, “what happened here,” and to have the tools to discover an answer.

Environmental storytelling is the designers’ careful use of select objects placed within the game environment that, when taken in total, answer our “what happened here?” question without resorting to overt exposition. In the opening scenes of BioShock, the player enters an extravagantly decorated ballroom, with a glowing “Happy New Year 1959” sign, empty wine bottles, discarded party hats on messy tables, and neon signs advertising liquor for sale at a perimeter bar, all slathered with an art-deco patina that screams decadence. This was one hell of a party.

But the entire scene is broken, deteriorated, and forgotten. The BioShock player is left to explore the room to find out what happened here, including who inhabited (and currently inhabits) the room, what the purpose of the room was, and with that start to understand why the room had fallen so hard.

Incurious players can dabble with, and be satisfied by, a few objects before moving on to the running-and-gunning portion of the game. Invested players can search every nook, investigate every cranny, and listen to every audiolog to build a richer understanding of Rapture and the reasons for its downfall.

The Finch home echoes BioShock’s storytelling methods. Newspaper clippings speak to the regional awareness of the Finch family curse. The titles of books strewn throughout teach the player about the interests of the characters who inhabited each of the bedrooms, with repeated titles across multiple bedrooms often indicating shared interests and heirloom knowledge. The sheer volume of books also speaks to the cloistered existence of the family while also highlighting the importance they place on education.

Edith’s pregnancy occupies the same conversational space about world-building. So, when I noticed the pregnancy, I was compelled to think deeper about it. Why show it? Why allow the player to discover it so far before it is overtly acknowledged in the game’s second half? And furthermore, why is her child not female? Amid a game full of apparently intentional choices, a detail like the character’s sex means something, right? Does a male child imply something about the proliferation of the curse that a female child would imply differently? Said more crassly, does a male have more control over the decision to procreate than a female?

So, I asked Ian a very uncomfortable question that I didn’t want to ask: was Edith Finch raped?

But before I divulge his answer, let’s return to the curse to understand why rape is even a possibility. Every time I play through What Remains of Edith Finch, I’m left wondering why Edith herself didn’t end the family curse. The simplest explanation could be that her waffling between belief and dismissal of the curse means she’s not committed enough either way to act. I understand this. I also understand that without the pregnancy Edith wouldn’t have the motivation to revisit her home and therefore would lack the occasion to write in her journal. Without the house and without the journal, What Remains of Edith Finch doesn’t exist. Narratively, I understand why Edith shouldn’t end the curse herself. But Edith is such a wise character that despite all the logical reasons for her pregnancy, I still want to believe that she would err toward ending the curse, forgoing her own progeny and their eventual, mysterious deaths.

Edith even writes of the moments after her mother’s passing: “and then I was alone. The last Finch left alive until I found out about you.” The implication here is that Christopher, her then-unborn son, was unexpected.

I’m walking a tightrope, I understand. An accidental pregnancy by way of a consensual relationship doesn’t mean Edith is an unwise character. But when your family may be cursed, and any offspring is condemned to an early death … OK, I’ll stop here for fear of trafficking too far down a road that I, as someone unable to become pregnant, could never truly understand.

So, what is Ian’s response to my question about Edith’s possible sexual assault? “I personally had never considered that it was something that had criminal connotations to it. I expected that it was probably not intentional. A 17-year-old woman in North America in the present day rarely gets pregnant intentionally, but even that I think is open to interpretation, and looking at what her life has been like … a lot of people around her died early, and she had a fairly unstable home life for much of her 17 years. Being pregnant is not statistically super unlikely… Just looking at the demographic data, that’s one of the least implausible occurrences I would say in the Finch family, but we deliberately don’t go into a lot of detail there. It ultimately isn’t relevant for the concerns that we’re exploring.”

Seeing something where nothing may exist—hell, even avoidance of absolute existence itself—I feel like that’s the very point of What Remains of Edith Finch. And so, despite a lack of my uncomfortable question’s resolution, I’ll choose to keep the answer documented here, like the Finches might, keeping record of possibilities that, through other eyes, might be truths.

But back to my original question. Why make Christopher male?

_____

There’s a concept in literary criticism called authorial intent, which argues that when we try to understand what a story means, we must consider the meaning that the author intended. If the author meant for their alien invasion story to be a metaphor for globalization, then the critic should consider that intent even if the critic didn’t make that connection themself. The competing concept, called Death of the Author, would allow that same critic to ignore the globalization stuff and focus instead on the sexy alien babes to conclude that the meaning of Attack from Planet Neptune is about “how cool it would be to make out with aliens.” Death of the Author would also allow the viewer to ignore the transgender metaphor that the creators of The Matrix series say is inherent to the films and instead be simply wowed by all the flying and Kung Fu.

I’ve always leaned toward the authorial intent side of the conversation. To me, the creator of a work has undeniable access to information that can help inform the work’s meaning. The author shapes the work, and that shape of the work informs its function and therefore informs its meaning. Think about the shape of a garden hose and how it allows for a stream of water that can be used to quench distant thirsty plants. If I saw a hose only as a rope, I would be categorically wrong.

I realize that leaning on the artist’s intended aim can be dangerous especially when the artist isn’t able or willing to express that aim or when the audience has no access to that aim otherwise. Or, as What Remains of Edith Finch has taught me, when there is no singular artist. No matter how aligned a game development team may be to an “abstract but describable goal,” a team comprises different people with different experiences and different skills. Ian tells me, “the game as it exists now is something stranger and more complicated than what I could have imagined. I had an idea of what this game was going to be but then there are 15 of us working for four years at various stages on this, and a lot of people put pieces of themselves into this game and it developed in ways that I no longer remember or understand.”

Ian showed me that by championing authorial intentionalism, I’m removing the ability for the player to own the interpretation. For a game like What Remains of Edith Finch, whose entire premise is reliant upon interpretation, forcing a single meaning is irresponsible. Please forgive me for my past ignorance, Ian.

But my awakening toward Death of the Author isn’t limited to What Remains of Edith Finch. Shifting the burden of meaning away from a single creator is important throughout technology-heavy disciplines like video game development where availability of resources and technical expertise guides the product equally, or at least more so than a single director. A video game is, after all, much more than a product of one person’s pen and paper.

It turns out that Christopher being visually male wasn’t an artistic choice meant to comment on his unique ability to end the curse (as I interpreted) but instead a practical one. “In terms of [Christopher’s] gender that was a pragmatic concern in an effort to try to distinguish him from Edith,” Ian tells me. “Because Edith is a woman, it just made a lot of sense for Christopher to not be a woman so that there would be less confusion about this character who you never really hear about. You only see him briefly at the very beginning and in the end. That was why he had a cast as well. [We were] just trying to find something that could visually distinguish him enough for him to have a hope of being memorable enough for players to think back, ‘oh yeah, two hours ago I saw this fellow, and here he is again.’”

The creator made what he considered an innocuous decision, and the audience (me) imparted meaning where none was intended.

This isn’t the only instance of such dissonance. I asked Ian about the use of halo effects to transition from deaths back to the present and whether those were representative of a religious ascension (“[No.] We’re really good at walking into the light [effects]”). We discussed the refusal to allow Edith to exit through the doggie door once she’s entered the garage (“we’re constantly streaming in new areas and throwing out the old to make room in memory and to avoid loading times”). I asked whether or not he pushed to have the thousands of book spine assets reflect the actual girth of the represented books (regarding his desire for this level of accuracy: he wanted to, but “that part of me died several years ago,” he said with a laugh, alluding to the part of him that presumably felt justified in asking his team to spend time on such ultimately unnecessary detail).

So, Ian made some arbitrary decisions in service to technical constraints and compromised on others for the same reason. But in my newfound Death of the Author awakening, none of these constraints should matter when analyzing the game. Edith can still have been a victim of sexual assault, even if Ian didn’t intend that interpretation. A monster could have boarded up the doggie door immediately upon Edith’s entrance to prevent her from leaving, even if limited memory is the official stance. Christopher’s cast could indicate an environmental disposition toward danger, even if the accessory’s official purpose is for visual distinction. The heavenly ascent following many death scenes could infer a religious tone, even if the development team simply defaulted to their halo-making skills. And those book spines, maybe there really are several versions of every book with several different font sizes and page numbers, because maybe in the Finch worldview, a change in the appearance of the words births an equally acceptable reality.

I’m starting to think, maybe Great-grandma Edie, and her alternative logic, isn’t so far-fetched after all.

_____

Later, the player revisits Christopher at the conclusion of his ferryboat journey (which is also the conclusion of the game), creating a framed narrative. At its most basic, a framed narrative is one that wants the audience to impart meaning upon elements that fall outside the scope of the main story. Using a film example, if I show you an image of an old woman in a rocking chair and then jump cut to an unrelated main narrative for two hours, only to return to the old woman at the end, I’m wanting that two-hour main narrative to inform a new understanding of the old woman. The unrelated becomes integral. Here, the seemingly benign perspective of a young boy becomes, at the end of the game, the only perspective that gives the player—and the Finches—hope. If Christopher dies, the curse dies with him. Future generations are saved but only because they won’t exist.

In this way the curse isn’t so much a supernatural threat as it is a fact of life. We all die. We are all cursed. But for Great-grandma Edie the curse may be an attempt to create everlasting life through myth and legend.

So, when Edith asks, “what kind of family finishes building a cemetery before starting the house?” the simple answer is: the kind of family that values the infinity of death over the brevity of life. And in those terms, can I really call Edie’s actions villainous? Perhaps, Edie’s actions are noble.

But should future generations shoulder this noble weight of the current generation? According to the state of New York, yes. How much weight? About $39.7 million worth of weight. Let me introduce you to Ada Jukes.

Six: The Birth of the Curse

“Edith has a right to know these stories!”

-Edie Finch to Dawn Finch

Ada Jukes cost the state of New York $39.7 million. All she did was start a family.

Born Margaret Robinson Sloughter during the mid-eighteenth century, Ada Jukes is the central figure in a study that claims she and her descendants prove the role of heredity in criminal behavior. Ada and her family were, perhaps, born cursed. Sound familiar?

Richard L. Dugdale, acting as a volunteer inspector for the New York Prison Association, learned upon a visit to the Ulster County jail that six people from four family names were blood relatives. Dugdale dug further, eventually claiming to have traced these prisoners’ lineage back to Sloughter, a woman he dubbed Margaret, Mother of Criminals (but would code as Ada Juke for his 1877 book The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity).

G. Wilse Robinson, M.D would summarize a conclusion in the June 1912 Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association: “Of the 1,200 direct descendants of Ada Juke, 1,000 were found to be criminals, insane, prostitutes, paupers, or inebriates. These degenerates had cost the state $1,300,000” ($39.7 million in 2023 dollars, adjusted for inflation).

Dugdale’s findings would help fuel a eugenics movement beginning in the 1880s and would be leveraged to justify state mandated sterilization and euthanasia to prevent further degeneracy.

The story of Ada Jukes caused many deaths. But did Ada herself cause any of them?

The truth is, the Jukeses are a composite of several families, and Dugdale himself stresses environment, not genetics, as the cause of the families’ criminal legacy. Dugdale’s study fails basic scientific rigor, yet even today his findings are used by some to justify racial and class prejudice. A casual internet search returns dozens of pro-eugenics websites that cite Dugdale’s findings.

Dugdale’s study was an attempt to explain away a family curse with science. But science is powerless compared to a good story. Pro-eugenics groups who bastardize Dugdale’s findings for their own means know this. Edie, too, knows this. So, what does Edie do amidst so much death? She has no interest in explaining the curse with science. Rather, she aims to escape the curse with story.

If premature death in the Finch family is inevitable, a reasonable response is to build a story so grand that it survives beyond life itself. So, her daughter, Molly, gets eaten by a tentacle sea beast. Her son, Calvin, simply flies away. Her other daughter, Barbara, gets killed by monsters. These stories don’t die as tombstone epitaphs. They live forever, across generations as all great stories do.

_____

Ian Dallas didn’t originally see death as a thematic adhesive across the generations. “We discovered a year or two into development that having the same locations and characters reappear was really powerful,” Ian said to Edge in July 2017. “It wasn’t like we were just saving assets to use between stories; it was something that made the stories feel more interesting and specific to our game […] Once we knew that all the stories were going to be about people dying, then [we had] to try and figure out a way to explain that.”

Dallas would continue, speaking to Eurogamer that same month. “... We started thinking ‘well, what’s the relationship between these stories? And between these people?’ And the idea of the family was a really good fit for that […] It’s like ‘what survives after someone dies, for people around them?’ So, the family was a way for us to look at the impact that these stories have beyond the stories themselves.”

Enter Edie Finch to formally shape this impact.

But why Edie? Why not any other family member? According to a slideshow-style View-Master sequence early in the game, “For 500 years the Finches have been famous throughout Norway for their fortune … and misfortune.” Edie didn’t invent this curse (assuming the View-Master sequence isn’t itself one of her fabrications[35]), so why does Edie take it upon herself to maintain the curse? Perhaps she feels responsible, as the sole surviving member of the family’s original escape attempt.

The View-Master sequence continues. Odin, Edie’s father, buries two more victims of the curse: his wife, Ingeborg, and their baby son, Johann. On January 7, 1937, in a desperate attempt to escape the curse, Odin Finch leaves Norway by ship, with Edie, Edie’s husband Sven, and their baby, Molly. In addition to his family, he ships their entire house across the sea. Their journey isn’t without a curse of its own, it seems, as 40-foot waves off the coast of Washington destroy the ship, sinking it and taking the house and Odin with it. Edie, Sven, and Molly survive. They build a family cemetery at the site where they washed ashore, on Orcas Island. Odin Finch is the first to be buried there.

Edie is of the first generation of Finches to take measures to escape the curse. This attempt failed. In Edie’s lifetime, she witnesses the birth of 11 family members and the death of nine family members (with one presumed missing). If not a curse, what could be responsible for such a disproportionate amount of death in a single family?

Maybe a family that braves an entire ocean with a house’s worth of bricks in tow isn’t cursed; maybe they are careless.

_____

The Finches are not a family concerned with safety. From the very start of the game, Edith’s march into the perimeter of the family home is itself a journey she approaches with surprising nonchalance. Remember, the player’s first experience playing as Edith is after she climbed over the chain-link fence surrounding the home. She says it herself: “Someone had put up a chain link fence, but it looked like I wasn’t the first person to hop it.” This would be a dangerous climb for anyone, but especially so for a visibly pregnant person.

Then, I spot the house on the horizon with its strange silhouette. From this distance the house appears fragile and disjointed, like a skeletal hand erupted from the earth, with each finger accessible only by slipshod stairs leading to fragile knuckles and then to flimsy fingertips. But what other design could I expect given Edie’s insistence to turn every bedroom into a shrine? The bedrooms can no longer be used as bedrooms, so as the family grows, the house itself must grow as well. The dense foliage surrounding the home along with the house’s position at the edge of a cliff means expansion can only go one way: up.

So, I’ve met a family who is raised in a home absent of common-sense safety precautions, with a matriarch who’s eager to offload responsibility onto previous (and conveniently silent) generations by way of a curse. Given this situation, it’s surprising to me that any of the Finch family members would survive to adulthood. Put another way, when danger is part of a family identity, one would expect a shorter lifespan. Long-haul truck drivers die more often than academic scientists. Police officers die more often than astronomers. And the reckless Finches die more often than the attentive Smiths or the judicious Robinsons.[36]

It’s hard to blame Edie for offloading responsibility in this way. The specter of the curse existed long before she was born. As a young woman, she endured a tumultuous, cross-ocean escape attempt that would kill her father. Why not associate the power of the curse with the house itself? The tip of the drowned house still peaks above the water, viewable from Edie’s bedroom window, defying Edie to forget its power. Every time she looks outside and sees the off-shore beacon, she affirms the curse—and even more heartbreakingly, she affirms it from within the replacement home, from within the destroyed vessel’s rebuilt totem. Edith says early in my introduction to the house, “even the fireplace had a story. Edie told me the bricks came from the original house after it sank.”

Edie witnessed the only documented escape attempt, and she witnessed it fail miserably. How could one not believe in a curse at this point?

But believing a curse doesn’t absolve Edie from disregarding basic, common-sense safety. All of the first-generation deaths are easily preventable. Molly’s death can be attributed to an unlocked bedroom window or carelessly placed poisonous berries.[37] Calvin’s death happens on a swing set that’s been placed dangerously close to the edge of a cliff. Sam dies in a hunting accident that could have been prevented with basic hunting safety precautions. Walter’s death can be attributed to Edie’s refusal to treat his PTSD.

The second-generation deaths can be attributed to various forms of learned familial dysfunction. Gregory, Sam’s son, dies after being left unattended in a bathtub while his parents argue about their impending divorce. Gus, Sam’s other son, is opposed to his father’s marriage to Kay. His angst during their wedding leads to him flying a kite in a lightning storm, causing his death.

Once we enter the third generation of post-Edie Finches, the deaths become less explainable and seemingly less preventable. Lewis died in a fish cannery; why didn’t the cannery adopt proper safety protocol, or why did his therapy fail him? Milton legitimately goes missing. Edith dies during childbirth. This less concrete understanding of the deaths mimics what Edie has always said about the unstoppability of the curse. By this third generation of deaths, Edie’s view of the curse had been so fully developed that the increasingly ambiguous nature of the deaths might now serve to vindicate her theory. To her mind, the curse has mutated for the sake of self-preservation, to be less “catchable.”

Edie has long twisted the causes of the deaths to cushion herself from blame. And perhaps to inflate this cushion, she lusts for attention as a way to gather support.

_____

Edie isn’t immune to the allure of fame. She believes that establishing a legacy is how her family will escape the curse. And the line between legacy and fame is quite thin. Fame isn’t required to create a legacy, but it sure helps.

Following Molly’s death, I get my first true taste of the fantasy to come and so I’m primed to search for an explanation. I haven’t yet been forced into accepting the fantasies. I haven’t yet been beaten down by Edie’s curse talk. Following Molly’s death, the game starts to build a case that Edie is a narcissist by first creating chaos (Molly’s fantastical death) and then offering just enough direction amid the chaos (Edie’s walls filled with historical newspaper clippings) for me to succumb to whatever happens. It’s impressive how much weight the bridge between Molly’s death and Edie’s story can hold.

Following Molly’s death, upon entry to Edie’s room, everything appears relatively normal.[38] Edie’s room is full of books, a bit disorganized perhaps, and the walls are covered in newspaper clippings and photographs like every police procedural TV drama’s hectic suspect pin board. Or, like the suspect’s own dimly lit room full of hastily scrawled notes and photographs of their next targets. In the movies, these two combatants—the murderer and the detective—are often framed to imply a similar psychology. Fade from the detective in front of his pinboard to the murderer in front of his target board. Edie’s room can be viewed the same way: Edith is at once a villain in search of a way to claim deaths and also a detective in search of a way to explain deaths.

The newspaper clippings hung throughout Edie’s room focus on Edie’s own desire for fame. This desire for personal fame clashes with her insistence that it is the curse, not her own manipulative perspective, that elevates her family’s deaths.

One article reads: “72 Year Old Woman Refuses to Evacuate Because of ‘a Little Forest Fire’”, to which Edith comments “One summer they evacuated the island but Edie refused to go. For a few weeks she was a celebrity.”

Later, we visit Barbara Finch’s room. Barbara herself sought fame as an up-and-coming actor. Her death sequence takes us through an issue of a Creepy Tales comic book (a Tales from the Crypt proxy). This comic not only documents Barbara’s fantastical death, but also acts as an important gameplay point by revealing the location of a hidden passageway in the basement. This hidden passageway would only have been known by the authors of Creepy Tales if someone—Edie—told them about it.

So, is Edie a villain? From a purely narrative, “every story needs a villain” perspective, then yes, Edie is absolutely this story’s villain. But Edith Finch’s voice actor, Valerie Rose Lohman, has a more nuanced perspective. She posits that because “[Edie] grew up around legends and fairy tales and folk magic [in Norway] ... that’s how she explains everything away with curses and magic and conspiracy theories in a way. I wish we knew more about what her life was like when she was younger. But she did raise an actor, and so I do wonder if there’s a sense of theatricality running through the family.”

When I ask directly if Valerie sees Edie as a villain, she remains nuanced: “Edie to me is so traumatized, and I think she deals with her trauma through magical whimsy… She’s [alive for all the deaths], and I think that it’s important to note that everyone has their own little bits of trauma. But Edith never knew that her uncle was living under the house. She wasn’t a part of his life. But Edie was living in the house when Barbara got murdered. All of these things she lived through, and so I look at her as very gray.”

Brandon Martynowicz, the game’s lead artist, has a similar reluctance to assign Edie as a villain. “I don’t think I would go as far as to say villain. I would say protective… She didn’t want anyone to die… ‘There’s a curse and there’s a way to break the curse,’ so she thought, ‘and if you listen to me, and if you do as I do, you’ll be saved.’ But I don’t think she believed that. I think that was just her last [attempt] to hang on to anything and try to control everything, and if that means hurting people’s feelings that’s what it means to try to save them.”

A great villain is the hero of their own story. Edie’s perpetuation of the curse could be seen through altruistic eyes as equivalent to any grandmother documenting a family history or perhaps equivalent to any surviving family member demanding a perfect obituary.

If Edie is the hero of her own story, who is her villain? It might be easy to suggest Dawn—her daughter and Edith’s mother—as the villain, given that Dawn is the most overly antagonistic toward Edie. It is Dawn who seals the rooms after each death, severing Edie from her shrines. It is also Dawn who blames Edie’s stories for so many of the Finch family deaths. It is also Dawn who removes Edith from the house, causing the rift that Edith returns from seven years later.

But I cannot forget Christopher. Edie’s legacy is the curse itself, and Christopher is the only Finch who can end the curse. He’s also the only Finch to have never met Great-Grandma Edie. In this way Christopher is literally fighting a myth with no corporeal form. One assumes he’ll only be motivated to fight by believing in the myths fed to him by his mother via her journal. Edith arms her child using the same tactics (storytelling) that Edie uses. The villain’s tactics suddenly seem not villainous when used against the villain.

Breaking the curse can’t be so easy, however. Edith’s own journaling to her as-yet-born son, Christopher, both arms him to conquer the curse while also perpetuating the curse. After all, it is written artifacts—letters written as myths about each of the deceased—that bring the player into the world of the curse. Simply mentioning the villain empowers the villain. But how can a villain be conquered if it can’t even be talked about?

Edith plays her role safe. She opts to relay both sides to her unborn son. Following descriptions of questionable deaths Edith often reveals that she doesn’t believe in the supernatural angle, at one point saying directly “I'm not sure if I believed all that.” And we the player can’t help but agree with Edith’s hesitation. We know, for example, that Uncle Walter isn’t a Mole Man, despite Edie’s newspaper interview. As Valerie observes, “no one told [Edith] that her uncle is agoraphobic and living under the house. And why did he become a mysterious thing when literally he was dealing with something very real? He could have been a part of the family. Because Edie was giving him food every day, she knew he was under there.”

So, how can a villain be conquered without mentioning it? Maybe it can’t be. But not mentioning the villain empowers it more. Edith knows she’s empowering Edie by keeping a journal, but what else can she do but trust the next generation to figure it out?

_____

Despite the evidence against Dugdale’s theories of hereditary degeneracy, I must admit that there is something alluring about his findings. When things are outside of our control, we have no choice but to accept their trajectory. There’s a sense of relief when we can distance ourselves from responsibility so severely and so confidently. There’s a kind of freedom in severing a difficult plant at its roots, of accepting that it can no longer be saved.

Dear Christopher #4

Dear Christopher,

When I met your mother, in 2017, she was already a ghost. But we hit it off, like old friends. She introduced me to her family, her childhood home, and eventually, to you. I was impressed with how comfortable your mother was in bringing a stranger into her fold, with how confident she was in the strength of her roots to deny the possible intrusion of me, a third party eager for agency over her life. But as soon as she started talking, I let my ego dissipate. This was your mother’s story to tell before it was my story to play.

Honestly, I’m jealous of her firm foundation. Despite the many years away from her childhood home, the home remained fixed in time, like it had been waiting for her to return. Though dusty and hollow, her roots still existed; her house was still—even if only by some cosmic force—her house. But me? When I was young my home never stopped moving. One day it was off South Hoch Road near 301st Street. The next day, Dogwood Glen, off 12th Street. Then Fourth Street. Then Lincoln. Then Elm. Then East California Street. Then West 245th Street. Over the course of 15 years in Osage City, Kansas my mother—pushed by raised rents and failed relationships—moved me and my two sisters into and out of 11 different houses, apartments, and trailer homes. I didn’t have a childhood home; I had a series of childhood waypoints. What memories I have feel unresolved. What roots I have never anchored to anything more than silt. Imagine denying roots their very purpose.

My own mother, Jean, was recently diagnosed with early-onset dementia. I don’t talk to her much. I’m not sure why. We have a good relationship, so I wonder if perhaps I don’t think to connect with her very often because her condition is too strange to me. The thought of her fading memories isn’t something I can understand, I think because my own memories lack anchors. Call me harsh, but of all the empathy I have for so many things, memory loss is beyond my capacity for understanding.

Meeting your mother showed me a different approach, one that impacts how I raise my own children. Unlike me, your mother was informed by the lives of the dead—she had roots. But she lacked the primary sources—the fallen family members themselves—to arrest her interpretations of the dead. Instead, in those dead people’s place she had living, flawed, malleable people. She had both your Great-great-grandmother Edie—who pushed interpretations upon your mother—and her mother, Dawn—who fought against Edie’s beliefs. Only when they had both died, when they had both joined the world of the non-malleable, was your mother able to finally navigate the past to form her own interpretations of its impact.

And what did she do with this new freedom? She passed the burden along to you. At first, I thought of her as selfish. But following her kind-hearted welcome into your chaotic (and frankly nearly unnavigable) family, I came to see her actions differently. I soon realized that she was giving you some roots. She recognized the need for cultivation and some degree of stewardship. If she couldn’t be there for you, maybe her words would have to be a good enough parent in her stead.

The human brain needs guidance. Without it, it creates its own, on its own, without care to the body it’s meant to pilot. Have you ever wondered why ghost sightings take place in sensory-deprived environments? At night. Neutral-to-cool temperatures. Silence. Stripped of external stimuli, the human brain creates its own stimuli, and from it, creates its own reality. The health science industry sells sensory deprivation tank experiences to promote this very result. Imagine paying money to be haunted by ghosts.

Your mother showed me the importance of tending to children. Because of her, I never miss an opportunity to tend to my own children. Though my mother’s circumstances were much different than my own, I’m proud to have rooted my own children in a single home for the past 12 years.

Your mother was uprooted from her childhood home against her will, but she had returned to it with a key in hand to tend a type of long-dormant garden. And, if I can assume your Grandma Dawn’s intentions, in accepting the key, your mother accepted an apology.

Imagine hearing a ghost say, “I’m sorry.”

Your friend,

Caleb

Seven: Answers in the Library

“Every Finch who ever lived is buried somewhere in the library.”

- Edith Finch

Once more, to the beginning. Edith has walked the asphalt path and now stands on the front porch.

A player who has not yet accepted the Finch home’s strange logic might move immediately toward the front door. This path is doomed of course (the locked front door refuses Edith’s key), but it’s not barricaded. It does not refuse a curious approach.

This choice—go to the front door or explore elsewhere—is as close to player choice as What Remains of Edith Finch gets. Judgment generally favors a video game that supports player agency—the player’s ability to impact the game world. But for a game about the impossibility of escape, true player choice and impact wouldn’t make sense. I would have felt robbed if given an open world.

In lieu of the locked front door, Edith steals a view of the house’s interior via the front door’s mail slot. Inside, she sees books. Too many books. A suffocating number of books.

These books are piled dangerously high, balanced precariously. A caught thread from a passing body’s knit shirt could easily topple a stack. The weight of a single footstep bending the aged wooden floors could collapse this delicate diorama of fractured belfries and steeples. More books frame a doorway to the right. Books tile each step in the main stairway directly opposite Edith’s peeking eyes. Through this mail slot’s limited viewport, I’m hit with a sublime contradiction: Books organize information, sure, but what use are they when disorganized themselves?

_____

The Finch house is filled with thousands of books,[39] spanning topics from cookbooks to academic textbooks, fiction to local histories, and beyond. The Finches appear to be a well-read family, sure, but given their quantity and chaotic displacement, these books convey much more than a family’s intellect. The books simultaneously reveal the messy nature of that intellect, and perhaps the messy nature of the family itself.

The books wrap walls and line door frames. They are crammed tightly together and are aligned to the architecture of the house, like the books are providing structure as bricks and wood can't be trusted to do alone. Given the house’s haphazard construction, books-as-structure feels as believable as bricks or wood or concrete or any other makeshift material keeping this house erect. By this logic, these books, and the stories they contain, literally keep the family safe: the house is constructed with stories; the family is constructed with stories. And from either lens—whether the books reflect the architecture or whether they reflect the family’s sense of legacy—everything about the Finch house is one perspective shift away from crumbling.

In some of the house’s darker nooks, the books appear almost infectious, spreading across the floor like a mold. Each step of the main stairway presents books like they are traps, ready to trip anyone dumb enough to venture deeper into the house. These strewn books are at once both warnings and captors.

Having been denied by the front door, I close the mail slot and enter the house instead through the garage via a doggie door, then into the kitchen, and eventually into the foray I had spied through the mail slot a moment ago. I now have confirmation that the interior of the house is no less confusing than the architecture itself. The chaos I witnessed through the mail slot is only a glimpse into the breadth of the Finches’ obsession with books.

The Finch house is a beautiful melding of a Borgesian library labyrinth with Mark Z. Danielewski’s titular House of Leaves. These comparisons aren’t accidental. Ian Dallas was influenced by both the Argentine author, Jorge Luis Borges, and by American novelist Mark Z. Danielewski. During development the team even had scenes based on Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel” and Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves. “Neither gelled,” Ian says. “But tonally we took a lot from both authors.”

Borges was a prolific writer during the mid-1900s, with many of his stories exploring the intersection of the author and their work, playing with a non-fiction format to tell fiction (or mostly fiction) stories. One of his most famous stories, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” (from 1941) tells the story of a book, called The Garden of Forking Paths, that can be read non-linearly. Unlike most fiction where characters follow a single path from beginning to end, The Garden of Forking Paths offers the impossible promise of all possible outcomes to all characters, each equally valid.[40] This idea would be explored further in Borges’s story “The Library of Babel.”

“The Library of Babel” explores the idea that a world with infinite information is worthless without organization.[41] The narrator of the story claims to be from a universe consisting of an infinite number of connected hexagonal rooms. Each room is lined with bookshelves crammed full of books. These infinite books are placed upon the shelves without order, and even the text within the books appears random, jumbled, and completely meaningless, though the content of every book is unique. Logically, however, with infinite rooms and infinite books, there must be within the many all-gibberish books, every coherent book as well. It’s the Infinite Monkey theorem explored as a short-story plot.[42] But without a book that indexes all the other books (a needle that is believed to exist somewhere in this literary haystack), the Library of Babel is basically worthless.

House of Leaves plays in the same metatextual space as Borges. Danielewski’s novel relies on found manuscripts to stitch together a compiled, multi-truthed narrative, rather than rely on a single-truth story. The novel even features a blind, elderly, Argentine Borges stand-in named Zampanò.

Where House of Leaves diverges from Borges is with its physical presentation and its focus on a very Finch-like house. The novel’s text doesn’t adhere strictly to a traditional English language, top-to-bottom, left-to-right format. Rather the text often climbs up the margins, wraps in upon itself, and even breaks across lines to project a feeling of ascension up a staircase while reading. This resemblance to a house’s floor plans aligns to the main setting of the novel: a strange house that, impossibly, is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

It’s easy to see how these two works, “The Library of Babel” and House of Leaves, contribute to What Remains of Edith Finch. Their exploration of infinity, their reluctance to accept a single truth, these ingredients combine to inform Edie Finch’s magical worldview.

Interesting stories have a way of inspiring interesting walks.

_____

The walking simulator owes a lot to literature. Dear Esther creator Dan Pinchbeck aimed specifically to “have nothing but story to keep a player engaged.” And story is—to force the comparison into the video game domain—the part of the video game that isn’t a video game. Strip away the combat, the systems, the HUD, the skill trees, and all the post-defeat controller-launching frustration and you’re left with a walking simulator primed to nurture a story. Walking simulators feed on player input more as a formality than a necessity. This is the limbless head-in-a-jar’s favorite genre. Give that head a stick to clench in its teeth, and with the head’s lack of coordination and urgency, a walking simulator satisfies a slow, meticulous stick-to-button pecking…X…Y…X. And such deliberation invites contemplation. Like a book does.[43]

Pinchbeck specifically claims the influence of William S. Burroughs, not just in theme but also in structure. Speaking to Eurogamer, he says “... looking at the way William Burroughs worked structurally was a big influence, but also I was really interested in moving towards a quite image-heavy, symbolic, poetic use of language rather than the normal descriptive tone we find in games.” Burroughs’s most famous work, 1959’s Naked Lunch, is unreadable by most accounts. The book is structured as a series of short glimpses into the lives of various characters, with no apparent desire to satisfy the traditionalist reader looking for a linear, digestible plot. These glimpses jump between time and space, stitched only by their format; the book binding itself is the sole assurance to the reader that these pages are meant to be a single work.[44] Separate, they read as disjointed scribbles. Burroughs himself intended the book to be read in any order. Sound familiar? Naked Lunch reads like an attempt to realize Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths. The walking simulator seeds itself in an approach that avoids favoring any single interpretation. The genre says “here is the world. It’s pretty cool. But don’t ask me to tell you how cool or why it’s cool.”

The walking simulator has been able to give the reader what The Garden of Forking Paths, Naked Lunch, and so many other non-linear stories have failed to give: actual freedom. These books offer the promise of non-linearity but are restricted by the inherent limitations of text. Paragraphs start and paragraphs end. There’s always a clear starting point and a clear ending point when reading. Even words themselves have specific beginnings and endings. But the walking simulator encourages players to explore the world “mid-word,” so to speak.

From the beginning of the game, I’m choosing to advance toward the misshapen house. I’m also choosing to avert my attention from that daunting silhouette, and instead take in the patina of the foliage beside me, to register the crumbling asphalt below me, to notice the bent fence behind me, and to fulfill any void that overt story leaves behind. Written literature, no matter how elastic it seems, gives its curated view only a limited lens. With video games, most notably walking simulators, the lens is as wide as my willingness to tilt a right analog stick, and the story access points are only limited by the amount I choose to veer the left stick.

Without the traditional gameplay trappings, I’m left to find meaning in the mundane. The foliage shines for a reason. The asphalt’s disrepair means something. Why is the fence railing bent? The gameplay is free of direction and so direction must be introduced. The Finches’ book collection offers that direction.

_____

For the Finches, books are survival. I don’t mean this just in the written-legacy-means-outwitting-death way of survival, but in literal survival. Of the thousands of books fertilizing the Finch ethos, equally as many lean into the pragmatic as into the artistic. Physical-science texts share the same space as humanities texts, implying a sense of equal respect for the two ends of the educational spectrum. But not all Finches weigh that respect equally. During development, Ian had three words he wanted the team to keep in mind: sublime, intimate, and murky. “The intimate part of that we described as being kind of like the feeling you get when you listen to an episode of This American Life on NPR, that you feel the presence of humans and of someone who’s actually living here.” Placing specific books within specific rooms aligns characters with their beliefs and their priorities, encouraging intimacy. “You’re getting a peek into what this person’s life might be like.” With Dawn, Edith’s mother, I get my clearest peek into just how unequal the educational spectrum can be. During the late game, I enter Dawn’s makeshift homeschool classroom, and for the first time, I’m struck by her abundance of physical-science texts compared to the oceans of cookbooks, novels, short story collections, singular-interest reference books, and histories that I’ve waded through in the house prior. Dawn is a mother set on breaking her children out of this insular, myth-driven world. She teaches facts. Her book collection reflects this.

Between the first floor’s flood of fiction and the third floor’s collection of mathematics texts, I’m drawn in by several books that offer a compromise between the extremes. The Finch Curse and The Finches: A Fallen Flock (neither have visible author names), based on their titles, purport to validate the curse, or at least validate belief in the curse, to an audience beyond the Finch family. When these books are taken alongside the Dreadful Stories comic book that depicts Barbara Finch’s death, Odin Finch’s own The Mysteries of Death and Thereafter, and Edie Finch’s own History of the Finches, it seems Dawn Finch’s own book To Teach and To Learn: Seven Ways to Create a Fulfilling Classroom might be less a pedagogical contribution and more a way to win ground in the Finch war for shelf real estate, a way to bend the long arc of the Finch legacy away from myth and toward science.

Then there’s the actual Finch library. I can see its door early, through the mail slot, though at the time I don’t recognize it as a library. Later, I’ll enter the door and I’ll see what books Edie has deemed worthy of the proper library treatment, and by contrast perhaps why the remaining thousands of books were rejected. And at that time, I’ll wonder, is it in there among the neatly curated truth, or is it out here among the haphazardly collected truthiness that this book you are reading right now would fit.

Eight: The Deaths

“I had questions about my family that only the house knew the answers to.”

-Edith Finch

Ian Dallas gives us tension, then leaves us on our own to wade through it.

An interview with Creative Director Ian Dallas will generally include three things: 1) the interviewer declaring their favorite character in What Remains of Edith Finch, 2) the interviewer demanding closure regarding the cause of that favorite character’s death, and 3) Ian’s refusal to comply with the interviewer’s demand.

Players consistently demand answers from Ian, and so it is amazing how consistently Ian refuses. He favors ambiguity over resolution, and it turns out, ambiguity makes people uncomfortable. See, What Remains of Edith Finch is a video game about openness and interpretation and building a mythos. A concrete, absolute What Remains of Edith Finch is simply not What Remains of Edith Finch; it would be a different game entirely. But this doesn’t stop fans of the game from begging its creator for answers.

Ian doesn’t recognize any character’s death story as canon. “I don’t have firm opinions about how these things happen,” he tells me. “Personally, I would love to believe in a world where there is this tentacle monster that is responsible for [Molly’s] death. That seems like a much more interesting and magical place. I think this idea of not knowing for sure how these things happened is a core part of the message that there is no way to know the truth, that we are living in a universe that is more bizarre than we can possibly imagine. And so much of our life is spent denying that fact that I think [the game] is a place for these kinds of stories to remind us of this kind of uncomfortable truth that we all know but often don’t admit to ourselves.”

It’s a funny stance to take, that this thing which he seeded, he nurtured, he pruned, he let bloom, he brought from cradle to grave, that he doesn’t comprehend the end of it.

Generally, when I hear creators distance themselves from answers in this way, I assume laziness. Shouldn’t a creator be responsible for their creations? Maybe, art isn’t required to provide answers, but shouldn’t the artist be obligated to identify and defend an intention beyond “I dunno.” But wait … past-Caleb already rejected authorial intent back in Chapter Five of this book.

The fact that I’m wrestling, in real time, with the viability of authorial intentionalism shows the severity of my need for narrative conclusion. This is supposed to be a book, dammit, not a diary. My thoughts should be organized, not spilled for later organization! An intentional thru-line, not a meandering stroll. So why are absolutes so desirable? Why is it so hard to accept ambiguity? Why, when life itself is chaotic, does an unresolved story irritate like a cut refused a scab?

Ambiguity is chaos. Maybe story is humanity’s answer to chaos.

Maybe, as a point of survival, people use story to justify their actions. Without justification, people can’t anticipate another person’s actions, and without anticipating action, people cannot form strong bonds and coherent societies. I’m comfortable living next to my neighbor because our shared society has agreed that murdering a neighbor is bad. But, if someone has a reason for murder, and can articulate that reason using storytelling to create empathy, other people may adopt the neighbor-murdering mindset, thus birthing a new society.[45]

In this way, stories teach a society how to act while welcoming sympathetic would-be citizens. Resolving a story is simply codifying a law, is tying a knot, is a gavel against its sound block, is allowing the blood to clot. “THE END” is the cut’s scab.

Reading fiction has been shown to make people more empathetic. A 2006 University of Toronto, Department of Psychology study found a strong correlation between oft-readers of fiction and better performance on empathy and social acumen tests. In 2013 a paper published in Science described similar results. And a lifelong series of “huhs” and “interestings” following my own readings of Brian Evenson stories reveal similar aptitude for comfortably existing in the headspace of … different … individuals.[46] Fiction is a safe playground for the mind to tease out the norms of a foreign group, and to therefore expand the very concept of “normal.” Conversely, fiction is where we can reflect on the need for limits on “normal.” Either way, story challenges our hypotheses on life. In this way, story is science, and science begets resolution.

A story teaches us about other people but only satisfyingly so if that story resolves. Otherwise, we only learn what; not how or why? Without how or why, we’re left with chaos. Edie’s stories teach her family members, and the player, about the small family society she’s built in the secluded woods of the Pacific Northwest. Her confidence in her own death-narratives attempts to form bonds within her family, but the death-narratives’ illogic ends up fracturing those bonds increasingly over the generations. Edie’s story of mythical death is incompatible with her granddaughter Dawn’s story of scientific death. This conflict ultimately breaks the family apart.

That’s the family’s narrative. But what about the player? How is the player meant to handle the ambiguity? Well, first by simply accepting that What Remains of Edith Finch’s ambiguity is the very point of the game. I approve of Ian’s interview dodges where I might admonish other creators for the same because What Remains of Edith Finch is crafted toward the ambiguous rather than being ambiguous as a point of existence. The world and the characters are defined, are unambiguous, so that the narrative ambiguity can resonate.

Ian isn’t the first storyteller to relish in a reader’s exposed nerve. One of his inspirations, Edgar Allan Poe, made a career out of ambiguity. The American author who lived only a short 40 years, had a huge impact on literature of the unknowable. Poe denounced stories buoyed only by superficial meaning. To him, when the intended meaning of a work—the artist’s intent—becomes clearly visible the work itself ceases to have artistic merit. Poe critic Richard Wilbur says that Poe conceived of art “not as a means of giving imaginative order to earthly experience, but as a stimulus to unearthly visions.” For a story to succeed, a degree of ambiguity isn’t only desirable but is required.[47]

Stripped of Poe’s defined intent, ambiguity is simply masturbatory. I won’t deny that the line dividing intentional ambiguity and masturbatory ambiguity can be temptingly dotted at times. During writing critique groups in college, it wasn’t uncommon for me to offer a piece of fiction, claim the ambiguity was intentional, and only after the piece had been properly critiqued would I rewrite with the reader’s conclusions in mind. A story about something maybe becomes a story about something definitely. In my opinion, this is how great fiction thrives. The best work is rarely written in a vacuum. The best work is scientifically vetted.

Poe’s stories are often described as strange, hallucinatory, weird, and mysterious. He leverages the resulting ambiguity for a specific effect. In the article “Ambiguity as Aesthetic Strategy: Edgar Allan Poe’s Ambitions for the American Short Story” Wanlin Li says:

… ambiguity actually works for Poe’s purpose, since it strengthens authorial control by way of forcing the reader to grapple more with parallel interpretive possibilities. In other words, in cases of ambiguity, Poe seeks the unity of effect not at the level of stable meaning, but at the level of making the reader aware of instability. (emphasis mine)

Poe, just as Ian would do, doesn’t actually want the audience to determine which of the parallel interpretive possibilities is “correct,” but rather he wants the audience to simply accept that parallel interpretive possibilities are possible.

So, when Ian deflects questions about the true causes of his character’s deaths, he’s perhaps not dodging. He’s moving out of the way so I can see the rest of the possibilities.

But, Ian, my fucking head won’t work that way![48]

_____

An awareness of the possibilities doesn’t resolve the tension left in their wake.

Someone telling me to calm down doesn’t make me calm down. In fact, the suggestion that calm can be so easily attained can be infuriating. Shortly after graduating college the world revealed its enormity to me. For the first time I was truly on my own, not even a roommate to offer the facade of community. Help, no matter what for, was no longer a neck pivot away. I remember thinking, what if I need to move something heavy? Never mind that I owned but one heavy thing: a surprisingly still-functional, ancient 1980s cabinet television set that, as yet another reminder of the community I no longer had, had been painted white in college so that visitors to our house parties could scribble their presence with a Sharpie marker Velcro-ed to the top of the cabinet. I still have that TV. It has gathered decades of dust, but I can still make out the faintly written signatures of long-gone friends and immature assertive declarations. Becca declared that despite the rambunctious nature of our parties, we were “still alive and sane.” Travis stated that he “was here,” which is followed immediately by “Bob Dole was not here,” assumedly written by not Bob Dole. Several people emphatically expressed an interest in “Boobs!” But what if I, post-graduation, post-community, needed to suddenly move that TV? Would I hire someone just for that? Would the worker arrive and laugh at the size of the job? “Sure, I’ll do it, but we have a $100 minimum fee,” the mover would say before offering: “You want me to move around some other stuff while I’m here, to make you feel like you got your money’s worth?”

The realization of aloneness, and the way it magnified the world, pushed me to my first panic attack. The doctor—a doctor I’d never met, that I had to contact specifically for this occasion; remember, I was alone, new to this giant world—put me on a prescription antidepressant and sent me home, but not before reminding me, several times, that I’m on the lowest dose possible for the medication. She meant well, as in, “if you have side effects, they should be small,” but all I heard was “you’re barely sick enough for a pharmaceutical company to want to make money off of you.”

So, doctor, so Ian, I don’t want to be told to calm down! I want validation that my problem is real. But ol’ Dr. Dallas is firm. Every interview. Without question. Ian gives us tension then asks us to wade through it, without help, our only oars are those we craft ourselves from bits of narrative flotsam and emotional driftwood. It’s a tough ask, but it is the main ask of the game. If Ian were to give us answers, the game wouldn’t work.

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida has an interesting take on how a binary outlook feeds tension. He says that with a binary culture, where things are perceived with rigid divide between two options—right vs. wrong, civilized vs. primitive, alive vs. dead, science vs. magic—any ambiguity is uncomfortable. This discomfort is a great opportunity for activists and artists to either bridge the divide or have fun with it. One of Derrida’s favorite examples is the zombie, an entity that exists in a not-quite-dead and not-quite-alive state, a state that’s impossible for a binary culture to resolve. In most stories about zombies, the ending resolves in expectedly binary terms: zombies are dead.

While playing What Remains of Edith Finch, I am constantly asked to align myself with one side of this tension, to choose between two narratives, the sterile and plausible (binary) vs. the magical and improbable (non-binary). So, what’s left to do but jump into the deep end of this sublime scuba diving adventure with a mouth full of Dramamine and gut full of butterflies, and embrace the fight between the defined horizon and my chaotic footing? Let’s go!

_____

As a reminder, What Remains of Edith Finch’s actual gameplay path is quite linear. Each death is presented as a stand-alone story, with very few options to sequence-break the intended path. As Edith, I explore a bit of the house environment, read a death note, get transported into the body of the subject in the moments leading up to the subject’s death, and following the death, I’m back into the house environment for further exploring. Then, do it all again and again until I’ve exhausted nearly every Finch.

The first death we explore is young Molly Finch.

Molly’s Death

“I’ll be gone soon, but I wanted to tell somebody about what’s gonna happen. It started when Mom sent me to bed without dinner.” - Molly Finch

1937 - 1947, died at 10 years old

Molly Finch’s death is, chronologically, the first Finch family death following Odin Finch’s ocean drowning. According to Molly’s own written account, on the night of her death, her mother had sent her to bed without dinner. As Molly’s hunger grew, so did her desperation for food. She inspects an empty Halloween candy bucket for any remaining morsels. She briefly considers eating her pet goldfish. She steals a few pellets of food from her gerbil, and though she comments that the pellets are dry but otherwise inoffensive, they fail to satiate. So, she then explores the en-suite bathroom for anything edible. There she swallows toothpaste straight from the tube and even eats a few holly berries decorating the windowsill. But her hunger only grows.

Outside her bedroom window, a small barn swallow catches her eye. Her hunger drives her to consider the bird as a meal. She opens the window to reach for it, and here we experience the first magical transformation of the game. Molly writes: “I reached out for her, and suddenly … I was a cat!”

It’s impossible to resolve, in binary terms, if Molly actually transformed into a cat. We are several unreliable narrators deep (the actual events of the story are nested within the events as described in Molly’s letter are nested within Edith’s journal), and so we’re firmly entrenched in an untrustworthy world. And Ian himself offers no help. When asked what happened to Molly, Ian, of course, says simply, “I honestly don’t know.” In the face of an impossible resolution, I must accept ambiguity.

Molly’s transformations don’t end with a cat. She transforms into many different prowling animals. After changing into a bird-hunting cat, she becomes a rabbit-hunting owl, then a seal-hunting shark, and finally a sailor-hunting tentacle monster. The game demands a lot from the player in a very brief amount of time.

Speaking to Edge in 2017, Ian says, “It’s an introduction to the player, just like it was an introduction to us as developers, into what this game is going to feel like.” And with a game that wants the player to feel many different things, Molly’s story proved to be one of the more taxing to develop. Ian continues: “We ended up making this system where you didn’t have any walls, [so] you could keep going forever and the world would appear in front of you. And then we ended up never using that again,” he laughs. “That’s typical of the excess of Molly’s story, that exuberance early in development of, ‘we’ll try this, and we’ll try that’. But it’s also the perfect introduction to what the game is, in that it is constantly reinventing itself. Even when you think you know where an individual story is going to go, it might have a hard right turn a few minutes later.”

Molly’s story is unique in that it’s the only story that’s presented transparently as a dream. Molly’s death both exists entirely in her own head and is the only death told entirely by the deceased person themself. And let’s not forget, Molly’s death features a shark rolling down a hill! Again, the game demands a lot from the player here.

Ian describes this player burden when speaking to Eurogamer in 2017. “A year into development we were in a meeting and pretty much the publisher and most of the people on our team wanted to cut [the shark rolling down the hill] because it just didn’t feel like it made any sense. And it didn’t really make sense because you’re in a girl’s dream. But I felt like it made sense to me, and I had to trust that it would make sense in the final version of the game. And I think it does, but it was just me being really stubborn in that moment, not listening to reason. It’s that same drive that can also get you into really bad shape if you keep pursuing it when it no longer makes sense. So having the wisdom to know the difference between the good ideas and the bad ideas is just this unending problem.”

This weight placed upon Molly’s shoulders was felt throughout the development team. Lead Artist Brandon Martynowicz reflects on the work that went into Molly’s story. “If you compare her story to every other story in the game, the amount of technical, artistic, and just pure man hours of work to be done was way more than anything else.” That first story had to work. It had to be something that would make player pay attention, to want to push forward through this weird world. During early demonstrations of the game, back when the Finch house was only a single floor and all other rooms were inaccessible, Molly’s story acted as the proving grounds for the rest of the game. A player’s “holy shit, this is fucking cool,” reaction, as Brandon calls it, during Molly’s story primes the player for the weirdness to come.

Brandon acknowledges that frontloading the game with such awe poses a risk. “It’s kind of a false setup, right, because no other story gets you that deep … but Molly’s story was a very, very special one.” In the end, Brandon trusted the direction. “If you get that first [story] right, and if you get players sucked in with an ‘oh, shit’ moment, then you’ve got them hooked, and hopefully they’re going to be there for the rest of the journey… With Molly’s story, I think the majority of people that played it were like, whoa, that was cool, that was different. I’m ready for more. Let me let me get into that, find that next room. Let’s keep going.”

Molly’s story is responsible for setting the stage for every story I explore for the remainder of the game. I’m not only expected to trust in the magic to come, but I must also consider the impact of Molly’s actual death on her mother, Edie. Molly’s death is arguably the only death that’s a direct result of Edie’s actions. Edie sent Molly to bed without dinner, which led to Molly’s hunt for food and eventually her death. In fact, our first exposure to Edie’s own voice is her refusal to hear her daughter’s pleas:

Molly: Mom? Can I come out now?

Edie: Sweetheart, it’s late. Go to sleep.

It feels natural for a mother to not want to blame herself for her child’s death. The Finch curse is a convenient scapegoat. Following such reasoning, confirmation bias can seep in to frame every other death. Molly’s story introduces Edie’s selfish interest in proliferating the curse, and so sets the stage for Edie’s villainy.

Death possibilities:

● Falling out of her second-story bedroom window

● Poisoned (by berries and/or toothpaste)
● Eaten by a tentacle monster
● None of the above

Edie’s Room

“The last time I was in Edith Sr’s room I was 10 and she was painting my portrait” - Edith Finch

Though Edie is chronologically one of the last Finch family survivors, I explore her room rather early in the game. Fresh from the childhood whimsy of Molly’s death, I breach Edie’s room through a second-story window,[49] and enter a space that at once feels more chaotic than Molly’s room, but also feels safe, somehow. Perhaps the newspaper clippings, which line the walls, lend a sense of connectedness to the real world that Molly’s death actively rejects. Perhaps simply knowing the age difference between Molly’s short 10 years and Edie’s much longer 93 years, imbues the room with a sense of defiance, a rare example of the curse’s limitations.

As explored in Chapter Six, Edie’s room provides a wealth of insight into both her own fantastical beliefs and her drive to memorialize. The newspaper clippings that fill her walls relate mostly to her own propagation of the curse. One framed cover story hanging on the wall, from the Pacific Probe, exclaims “Mole Man Beneath the Finch House.” Edith comments, “Edie gave a big interview about a moleman living under the Finch house. My mom was furious.”

The very format itself—a newspaper clipping—further exemplifies the tension that the entire game is built upon. A newspaper is traditionally considered a document of truth. Edie being quoted and printed substantiates her stories. Though Edie’s presentation in the newspaper may simply be as a subject to a readership entertained by her stories, she’s been given a stage, and sometimes a stage is all someone needs to support a truth.

Edie was also quite a competent visual artist. She painted portraits of each dead family member, featuring their birth and death dates. When I examine a half-finished portrait of Edith’s brother, Edith comments, “Lewis died a week before we left but Edie already started to memorialize him.” Does Edie have a premonition about when the curse decides to claim a life? Is she so in tune with the curse that she’s able to reliably align her creative output to the family deaths? If so, how am I meant to understand Edith’s earlier comment, “The last time I was in Edith Sr’s room I was 10 and she was painting my portrait”? Perhaps Edith really is the key to escaping the curse. Perhaps Christopher truly will be the first Finch to live without the curse’s weight upon their shoulders. After all, Edie never started painting a portrait of Christopher, right? It seems only the generations that Edie is alive to influence are the generations with any concern for the curse.

Calvin’s Death

“How I Want To Remember my Brother, by Sam Finch. The thing I remember is that when he made up his mind, that was it.” - Sam Finch

1950 - 1961, died at 11 years old

It is not possible to swing over the bar. But kids on swing sets don’t care about what’s possible.

With a standard playground swing set, just a seat held by chains leading up to a horizontal bar, it is impossible for a single person to power themselves up, up, up, and fully around the swing’s central bar. Why? Once the swing reaches a 90-degree angle versus the ground, the chains will lose tension as the rider succumbs to maximum amplitude during oscillation. This loss in tension means a loss of kinetic energy as the swing tries to return to its natural equilibrium position, which is: vertical chains holding a seat holding a sad kid coming to terms with the limitations of the world.

But when Calvin made up his mind to do something, that was it. And Calvin was going to fly.

I start as Calvin sitting in a swing, at the equilibrium position with Calvin’s twin brother Sam’s narration filling the space. Sam describes Calvin as a boy of persistence, a boy who, despite Sam’s insistence that going around the bar was impossible, was going to do it anyway. I can affirm Calvin’s defiance in the face of safety: Calvin’s right arm is bandaged; his left leg is in a cast; the swing itself sits precariously at the edge of a cliff. Calvin is no stranger to danger. His cavalier attitude toward safety is entirely in-line with the Finch legacy, a legacy where caution is ignored, and gaslighting dismisses consequence.

But Calvin wasn’t going to settle with simply swinging around the bar. Calvin dreamed of one day becoming an astronaut and going to space. Calvin was going to fly. And, according to Sam, Calvin did fly.

The sterile and plausible version: Calvin, at his pendulum’s apex, jumped from the swing and fell to his death over the cliff. The magical and improbable version: he simply flew away. Sam ends his narration with: “That’s what I want to remember about my brother. The day he made up his mind to fly … and he did.” There’s a lot going on here, but perhaps most important is that Sam admits that his version of the events is a belief, not an objective fact. “That’s what I want to remember…”

With the game’s first death, Molly’s, I experience a death that could be Edie’s own fault. Now, with the second death, Calvin’s, I see Edie indoctrinating her family into a myth-based belief system, a tool Edie uses to remove herself from blame. I can almost feel Edie, looking over Sam’s shoulder as he writes this letter about his brother, telling him to change his descriptions, to helpfully remind Sam (ie, coerce him into believing) that what Calvin did was not fall to his death, but actually fly. It’s possible that Sam, from this point forward, straddles the line between myth and reality more finely than any other Finch. Perhaps, Sam has been taught that the few seconds Cavin spent mid-air as he fell to his death is “flying.” Calvin both died and flew. Two truths, one event.

Lead Artist on the project, Brandon Martynowicz, recalled joining Giant Sparrow, with Calvin’s story being his entry point into the team. “The project had already been in development for about two years when I was contacted by Giant Sparrow, and I was actually in a great time of trying to transition and leave Treyarch.”[50] The “atrocious” working conditions, specifically related to crunch[51] and work life balance, had Brandon looking for an escape from the enormous studio environment into a much smaller development team. During a job interview with Giant Sparrow, Brandon was allowed to play Calvin’s story, at that time called simply “The Swing Story.”[52] “I was floored. I was like, ‘wow, I’ve never seen, played, or done anything like this in a video game before. This is fucking rad.’ And that’s really what kind of grabbed me and made me want to dive into this project.”

What’s so captivating about Calvin’s story? What is it about playing this story that’s mechanically unique enough to grab an industry veteran like Brandon so powerfully?

In the shipped version of the game, the player begins Calvin’s story from the boy’s perspective, sitting in his swing, looking down to his legs as his feet dangle inches above the ground. The game offers no additional direction. No button prompts. No tutorials of any kind. The player is left only with the barest, most essential of video game direction: press a button and see what happens.

Most button-presses do nothing. Only when I manipulate the gamepad’s dual thumbsticks does the on-screen character provide any kind of feedback. Moving the right thumbstick awakens Calvin’s right leg, but only slightly. Moving the left thumbstick stirs Calvin’s left leg, equally as ineffectually as his right. Even though there is movement, I don’t feel like I’m actually impacting the game in any meaningful way.

But eventually I notice that when I coordinate the legs in tandem, along the same axis, the swing, and Calvin with it, starts to move. Truly move. Then, I refine my thumb-movements to align the two inputs even more closely. Suddenly, magically, the impact of repeatedly successful thumbstick “pumps” gives Calvin greater and greater height. I’m learning how to swing!

And here is where I fall in love with Calvin’s story. As soon as I recognize the pumping rhythm, I am transported back to my own childhood, when I made that same connection, on a playground so many years ago. This mental time-travel placed me into the brain of my younger self, a younger brain that, like Calvin, like Sam, and like so many of the young Finches, was primed to embrace fantasy, to be skeptical of physics, to believe that swinging over the bar is possible. The game is gaslighting me the way Edie was gaslighting Sam. I’ve been lulled into complacency. The game’s mythical visuals, mythical backstory, and now myth-inducing mechanics come together to do something video games simply don’t bother attempting to do very often. What Remains of Edith Finch wants to change the player.

Despite their best efforts video games are limited in how deep they can immerse a player. Game designers can only build their experiences around known constants. Designers know what input the players will use. They know what hardware the players will have access to. They know that the visuals will be received through a flat screen. But unknowns exist, and generally designers are forced to resolve themselves to artistic forfeiture and ignorance. Game designers can’t account for the room we play our games in; does my broken furnace enhance my opening-hours of Red Dead Redemption 2’s slow slog through knee-high snow or does it crack Journey’s desert facade? Designers can’t account for the noisy construction crew across the road. Designers don’t know when I’ll need to pause the game (to take cookies out of the oven) nor for how long the game will remain paused (to turn off the smoke detector and clear the air after getting distracted by a side quest for just long enough to burn the entire batch of cookies). So, when a game designer is able to innovate within these known constraints and around these uncontrollable unknowns, I take notice.

Four years before What Remains of Edith Finch, in 2013, Starbreeze Studios released Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, which asked the player to control two brothers independently, one brother for each of the gamepad’s analog thumbsticks. The player must break down the coordination between left hand and right hand that other games have accepted as convention. As the player develops this new division, the game’s puzzles become increasingly complex. Eventually, the one-brother/one-hand assignment feels natural, so much so that during the late-game when one brother dies, the resulting uselessness of one hand truly feels like losing a limb. Three hours of constant use suddenly halted. Habit forced me to continue involving my dead hand, despite the inconsequence. Every button pressed with no resulting feedback—just the hollow click followed by silence—was a reminder that my brother was dead.

Before Your Eyes, a 2021 game from GoodbyeWorld Games, tracks the player’s eyes through a video camera. When the player blinks, full swathes of the player character’s life pass. Were you reliving the playfully awkward moments that seeded a lifelong friendship with your neighbor? Blink! Gone. The player character’s life, much like the player’s, much like all of ours, passes quickly.[53]

Prior to the release of Resident Evil VII in 2017, Capcom released a virtual reality demo titled Kitchen that finally gave reason for a player’s hands to remain gamepad-width apart; the player character’s first-person perspective avatar is being held hostage with their hands tied. Innovation with constraints, literally.

In addition to the swing mechanic, Calvin’s story uses such myth-inducing mechanics in a more subtle way: I’m killing myself. Though Molly’s story introduced me to a first-person experience with a Finch death, my involvement adhered strictly to the safe, power-trip fantasy that many video games do. I never controlled Molly while she was in danger. Rather, I always took on the form of a predator hunting prey. Calvin’s story is different. I know for certain that Calvin is dead (remember, Sam, not Calvin, is telling the story of Calvin’s death). Then, when I recognize the mechanical impact of my thumbstick “pumping,” my excitement over having unlocked the game’s hidden mechanic is quickly snuffed out by my realization that I’m actively pushing Calvin along to his death. I know Calvin will die. And I must be responsible for his death. This inevitability mirrors the inevitability of the curse. There is no escaping a Finch death.

Death possibilities:

● Leaping from a swing to fall over a cliff
● Falling from a swing and breaking his neck
● Flying away
● None of the above

Barbara’s Death

“Barbara was a child star for two years. Until America grew out of it.” - Edith Finch

1944 - 1960, died at 16 years old

Just three years following Molly’s death, Edie and Sven give birth to a second child, Barbara. Immediately upon entering Barbara’s bedroom, I’m bombarded with keepsakes collected throughout her short but powerful stint as a child actor in horror movies. I rise from the hidden passageway connecting Calvin’s room to Barbara’s room to meet a glass-doored display cabinet filled with memorabilia. A movie poster advertising Barbara’s starring role in My Friend Bigfoot, gaudily framed by marquee light bulbs, backdrops a few award statuettes. The opposite wall displays a mural of the Hollywood hills and its famous Hollywood sign, replaced here with Barbara’s name in the iconic white letters. Further down the wall, playbills patch a cork board above a vibrantly painted dresser. Barbara’s bookshelves are, of course, packed with theater texts: The Red Carpet, Nailing the Interview, Masters of Cinema, and on and on and on. Like Edie’s room, Barbara’s room reflects her own legacy, built as the legacy itself came to be. Like a self-portrait. Like self-shot B-roll for a mid-production biopic. Barbara’s walls aren’t memorials; they are affirmations, idols even, built by the young deity herself. Barbara’s room feels like it has always existed as a shrine, and in this way, in this house, has always occupied a strange place between life and death.

Barbara’s room reflects the final stage of Edie’s influence. With Molly, Edie found a need to distance herself from blame. With Calvin, Edie began influencing other minds to believe in the distance she had created. With Barbara, the child does not need to be influenced, because the child has already embraced myth as a direct motivation. Barbara’s life as a child actor is the de facto fabrication of truth. Edie must have been so proud.

Eventually, I find the entry point into Barbara’s death story. A Tales from the Crypt-style horror comic book called Dreadful Stories lays at the foot of Barbara’s bed. As I page through the comic book, panels animate to reveal Barbara’s final night alive.

After having been out of showbusiness for years, 16-year-old Barbara was scheduled for a comeback at a local horror fan convention that night, Halloween. Unfortunately, her father, Sven, unexpectedly suffered a table saw accident, forcing Barbara to cancel her convention appearance so that she could care for her younger brother, Walter, as their father sought medical help at the hospital.

Dreadful Stories reveals that Barbara’s boyfriend, Rick, visits her at her home that Halloween night. He’s adopted a role as her vocal coach, helping her to regain the scream that made her famous. After an evening’s worth of failures, he constructs a method-acting scenario in which he hopes to legitimately scare her, thereby forcing a real scream. Somehow, he reasons, releasing an honest scream will reawaken Barbara’s talent. In typical horror story fashion things go wrong. Rick goes missing. A stock killer hunts Barbara throughout her home. The evening culminates with young Walter hiding under his bed as a horde of monsters breaks into the house. Barbara is murdered. Rick is nowhere to be found.

Visually, Barbara’s story is starkly different from any of the other stories.[54] The 3D models and straightforward camera scripting of other stories are replaced here by a flattened, 2D, illustration style with cameras flying into and out of comic book panels as the story progresses. This complexity introduced a lot of technical and workflow hurdles. It turns out that working with a comic book artist who lacks a professional history in video game development can be quite difficult. “I’ve never worked with comic book artists before,” says Lead Artist Brandon Martynowicz. “Especially old school comic book artists that aren’t as young and technically savvy and workflow [minded], the way that the rest of us on the team were. He was a fantastic artist,” he insists, but “it was hard to get art out of him.” Despite the frustrations, the experience led to one of the most visually striking stories in the entire game where I get to interact with both fully 3D environments as well as flat, 2D drawings. The visual difference between the two styles is indiscernible from the player’s perspective, further emphasizing the game’s tension between reality and fantasy. Any panel could just as easily be a portal into an interactive world as it could be a simple drawing on a piece of paper.

Edith Finch’s voice actor, Valerie Rose Lohman, remembers Barbara’s story as one whose logic she initially wrestled with. At first, when she started the vocal recording process, she was frustrated by the developers’ unwillingness to divulge details surrounding the character deaths. “I think they gave me the best that they could… They tried to explain [...] the comic book thing, and I was like, ‘okay, so she was eaten by monsters, but this takes place in the real world, and the Crypt Keeper is narrating it.’ I did not understand the depths of artistry that were involved in the storytelling.” This restriction ultimately helped Valerie realize Edith Finch. “Edith is perplexed by all of it. It is all weird and strange and doesn’t make sense,” so why should it need to make sense to the creators themselves? And why then, should we, as players, expect everything to make sense?

Death possibilities:

● Killed by her boyfriend

● Killed by an angry group of disappointed convention goers

● Eaten by monsters

● None of the above

Walter’s Death

“I saw Edie sneak down to the basement once, carrying packages. I thought maybe she was hiding presents. It turned out she was hiding a lot more than that.” - Edith Finch

1952 - 2005, died at 52 years old

The Halloween night that Walter’s sister disappeared, Walter did too. His room, these many years later, is unlike any other room in the Finch house. It’s empty. Lifeless, I’d call it; where the artifact-richness packed into every other room proves the spaces’ heritage, Walter’s childhood room practically echoes. Its emptiness is, perhaps, shrine enough for what became of Walter. For all intents and purposes, he simply disappeared.

The critical path so far has been simple: from padlocked gate to doggy door to Walter’s empty bedroom. This room is the only unsealed bedroom door in the entire game, and as such it acts as the only possible entry into the winding, hidden tunnels that connect other sealed rooms. These tunnels allow Edith’s passage between the bedrooms, circumventing Dawn’s attempt to keep everyone out. It is from Walter’s room, via the tunnels, that we were able to enter Molly’s room, then Edie’s, then Calvin’s, then Barbara’s, and then … nothing. Though the player path remains linear, Barbara’s room disrupts the progression I’ve come to expect. So how do I get from Barbara’s room to … wherever? Walter died with no secret passageway to connect the spaces.

The answer lies in Edie Finch’s own obsession with fame. Dreadful Stories, the comic book that depicted Barbara’s final hours, reveals the location of a hidden key that opens the locked basement door, and with it, a false refrigerator, shoved into a dank, back corner of the basement. The refrigerator, which Dreadful Stories depicts as boyfriend Rick’s hiding spot as he awaited an opportunity to scare Barbara back into stardom, opens in the current timeline not to chilled food, but to a hidden bunker filled with hundreds of cans of food, enough food to sustain a person for decades. I think I found where Walter died.

But I shouldn’t know about this bunker. Nobody should. The comic-book reveal means that Edie, in her drive for legacy, was eager to compromise her family’s safety. She revealed this safety feature to the comic book’s publisher. What good is a hidden bunker once unhidden? Once again, Edie sacrifices the safety of her family for the promise of an enduring legacy.

Now with the knowledge of the hidden safe room, I enter the basement, step through the false refrigerator, and into a drab yet surprisingly spacious concrete bunker. Its walls are lined with provisions, ranging from large jars of jam, peanut butter, jugs of water, and cans upon cans of beans, fruits, and vegetables. It’s honestly not a bad setup for The Mole Man of Orcas Island.

Barbara’s traumatic death triggers a lifelong agoraphobia that drives young Walter to an underground bunker, establishing the basis for one of Edie’s skewed fictions I found earlier hanging from her bedroom wall. When Edie told the local newspaper about a “Mole Man” that lived beneath the Finch house, she was referring to Walter. Upon reading the article, Edith says, “My mom was furious.” The schism between Dawn and Edie had been widening for years before Dawn and Edith eventually left the Finch home, with Edie’s selfish treatment of Walter’s mental illness being a particularly potent point of contention.

Once through the underground foyer corridor I find the portal into Walter’s story, a handwritten letter on yellow legal paper, tucked away in a small drawer within a small desk. Walter opens his letter as though his death were a suicide. “Goodbye, everyone,” he begins. “I can’t believe I’ve been down here for 30 years.” Poor Walter. Suicide? But I suppose I can comprehend the motivation. Admittedly, such an end seems sadly logical to someone like me with a comparatively healthy brain. Walter’s family is obsessed with a curse that has killed many of his family, most recently—and most proximately—his own sister. He’s removed himself entirely from society, with his only connection being Edie herself, someone well-known to dismiss a family member’s mental health. Even if I don’t agree with Walter’s suicide, I at least approach an understanding of it.

But What Remains of Edith Finch has taught me to expect the unexpected. Walter’s letter takes a surprisingly optimistic turn, as he accepts the grit that solitude has taught him. “If you wait long enough,” he says, “you get used to anything.”

Walter isn’t only commenting on his ability to “get used to” the seclusion itself, but also to come to terms with an aggressive, periodic rumbling that’s been happening constantly during his decades-long stay in the bunker. The rumbling literally shakes his entire bunker and the entire earth around him. Earthquakes, possibly? Waves crashing against the cliff wall upon which the Finch home sits? Maybe. Or, as a 46-year-old Walter with an eight-year-old’s stalled brain insists, a monster on the other side of the door.

By this point in the game, I’m at my most taut, pulled between the world of reality and the world of myth. Every reality has a mythical extension, and with Walter I can experience this in a way I haven’t explored since Molly’s story. Walter, though 52 years old at the time of his death, hasn’t been properly cared for since witnessing his sister’s death. He is, outside the instruction of Edie and a few books on his shelves, a child. Walter’s interpretation of the outside rumbling as coming from a monster is believable even if the existence of an actual monster remains unbelievable.[55]

Eventually, the rumbling stops. Walter convinces himself that he’s ready to leave his bunker. But not just leave; he wants to confront the monster, this monster he believes killed Barbara, Calvin, and Molly. “Whatever’s out there,” he says, “I want you to know I’m ready for it.”

So, he descends a ladder to a deeper level of the bunker, a smaller room less conducive to long-term living. The concrete walls have been exchanged for dirt walls. Room-filling lights have been replaced by simple bulbs dangling from sockets along exposed overhead wiring. If there’s any environment that’s easy to breach, this is it. So, he takes a sledgehammer to a far wall. He hammers until he pierces the dirt. Sunlight pours in.

Walter steps through the broken wall and onto a tunnel housing a train track. The monster, the rumbling, seems to have come from the passing of scheduled trains. Walter, so enamored with the sun, and lost in his own thoughts of what non-canned food must taste like, doesn’t notice an oncoming train. “I can already imagine the sun on my face,” he says as a train whistle blows, and the scene fades to white.

Walter died when Edith was six years old. Edith lived over half her life at the Finch home with her uncle living just below her.

Walter’s story, more than any other, feels quick. Despite the narrative time span of only a few decades, Walter’s change from hermit to wanna-be hero feels forced considering how delicate and deliberate every other story has been. One moment he’s scared, the next he’s brazened. This comparative weakness is explained perhaps by how much Walter’s story changed during development. Speaking to PC Gamer in 2018, Ian Dallas says, “[Walter’s story] was a riff on the Weeping Angels story from Doctor Who and also The Prisoner. There’s this guy trying to escape this strange world of 1950s Americana, and he walks around with a flashlight, and when he turns around this crowd of people with pitchforks gets a little closer. Then there’s a gradual reveal that you’re actually in a model train set, and this giant hand comes down periodically to move things around. Walter picks up this little person who had tried to escape, and then realizes that he himself has to escape and then goes out the tunnel [as in the finished game]. The version we shipped with was the last 5% of this absurd dream.”

It’s easy to see where a pitchfork mob’s outside influence could better persuade the player into believing Walter’s quick turn toward escape. However, I can also understand that putting Walter’s death-by-actual-train against death-by-toy-train could be ill-perceived in a game full of stories where contrivance is avoided in favor of purposeful ambiguity. In that way, Walter’s story feels like an intentional turning point. Walter was born into a world of myth. He lived for most of his life with his only outside influence being Edie herself, the source of the myth. Yet he’s still able to pull away from this influence, to address the curse head-on with a drive to push it away. He ultimately fails, but the effort matters.

This mid-game death then becomes a perfect time to catalog and reflect upon the events that have transpired in hopes of contextualizing what is to come. Molly is the impetus to Edie’s dependency on the curse. Calvin’s death reflects Edie’s goal to indoctrinate other family members into the curse. Barbara’s death shows us that fame mirrors myth, which then roots the curse into normalcy. Now, with Walter’s death, we see our first fight against the curse. It is perhaps not coincidental then that Walter’s death letter is the last first-person death letter in the game. From this point forward the death stories are much more detached, taking the form of a series of photographs, legal correspondence, medical opinion, and even a poem. Well, unless you consider the journal that Edith herself is writing…

_____

Edith’s own documentation contributes to, and validates, the curse. If writing creates legacy—especially the style of subjective writing that journaling encourages—then the simple act of documentation means that Edie’s influence has persisted, right? At one point, Edith herself considers this: “I don’t know if I should be writing this… Maybe it’d be better if it just died with me.”

In this way, the adage “history is written by the victors,” applies, but simultaneously condemns. If the “winning” viewpoint is what endures, and anything written puts a few points on the “Curse is Real” side of the scoreboard, then the curse itself is inevitable. Simply teaching the curse, even if as a battle-strategy to undermine it, keeps it alive. But Edith simply could not help herself. She follows her previous statement with, “But I thought you [my son, Christopher] should know about your family. And the history you’re a part of.”

So, if Edith knows that by writing this journal to her unborn son, she is maintaining the curse, why does she do it? Is she offloading the burden onto another generation, distancing herself from responsibility in the same way Edie herself has done for generations? Or are her intentions truly altruistic, in that her being the last connective thread to her unborn son’s extended family means she has an obligation to keep that thread intact?

Valerie Rose Lohman sees this in a different way. Maybe educating future generations about the curse does maintain it, but it also exposes it so that someone, perhaps Christopher himself, can nullify it. Or if not nullify it, at least leverage it for some enduring good. She says, “I have always looked at [the game] as a de-stigmatization of mental illness. Things can appear so scary and so foreign when we don’t give them a name, and we don’t explain them to people. That’s why there’s so many people that are ostracized by their family if they’re dealing with mental health struggles. I think Edith’s intention is to say, ‘here is the family that you will never know, and here’s what they went through. So that if you feel in any way like any of these people, you know that you aren’t alone, you’re not crazy.’” Specifically, Valerie cites Walter’s life and Edith’s surprise when she finally learned that her uncle had been living under their house for generations. “Why did he become a mysterious thing when literally he was dealing with something very real? He could have been a part of the family.”

This makes sense. Edith is weary of committing to any single bit. When referencing the curse, or closing out a death story, she’s careful not to tie any bows on the deaths. She peppers variations of “I’m not sure if I believed all that” throughout her journal, giving her future son the freedom to fight against the curse while simultaneously learning about it. With Christopher, there is hope.

But Christopher is still a Finch. Judging by his casted right arm, danger might have survived another generation beyond Edith.

Death possibilities:

● Suicide

● Medical condition as a side effect of his agoraphobia-induced reclusion

● Killed by monsters
● Run over by a train
● None of the above

Sam’s Death

“My grandpa Sam spent 7 years sharing a room with his dead brother, Calvin” - Edith Finch

1950 - 1983, died at 33 years old

For seven years Sam awoke every morning in his dead brother’s bedroom. Following Calvin’s death, Sam lived on the opposite side of their shared bedroom, with Calvin’s side frozen in time per Edie’s enduring directive. From the age of 11 to the age of 18, Sam awoke to an unchanging view, with only his own side of the bedroom adapting to time’s passing. As Calvin’s side remained forever reflecting the whims of an 11-year-old outer space enthusiast, Sam’s side evolved but still remained tethered to that fateful day of his brother’s death.

Perhaps it was Sam’s strange adolescence, spent on the audience side of a roped-off museum exhibit, that birthed his interest in photography. The Australian landscape photographer Destin Sparks says that photography is “the story I fail to put into words.” Sam would likely agree. Despite his mother’s attempt to imbue Sam with a love of verbal storytelling, it’s easy to see that living seven years next to an unchanging shrine would instead feed a love of visual storytelling. Sam learned the importance of legacy but developed a different way of expressing it.

Sam’s half of Calvin’s and his shared bedroom is partially filled with photography paraphernalia including development kits, slides, developed black-and-whites filling his walls, and even a few books, but noticeably fewer than the rest of the rooms in the house. The remainder of his half exposes Sam’s other, and equally telling interest: war.

Young Sam’s half of the room practically creaks under the weight of so much military excess. The walls are lined with uniformly sized tree trunks patterned to resemble the perimeter walls of a Civil War era log fort. Air Force planes and a tiny American flag speckle the walls’ rare remaining bare spots, with the rest patched over with military propaganda posters. Sam sleeps on a bed with a camouflage-patterned pillowcase.

While Sam embraced the war aesthetic even during Calvin’s life, it’s not hard to see how Calvin’s death exacerbated Sam’s proximity to death. Edith writes, “Instead of hiding from death, Sam seemed to go out of his way to meet it.” Sam enlisted in the military immediately upon turning 18 years old and never entered his and Calvin’s shared room ever again.

After his military stint, Sam would marry a woman named Kay, and together they would move into the Finch house. Why would Sam return to the Finch house? Considering Sam’s history, it seems selfish at least, erring toward arrogance, to bring his new family back to a home he was so eager to escape. Currently, Sam is still young. Kay became pregnant the same year Sam left for the military. This might explain why Kay moved into the Finch home, as she may have needed help during her pregnancy while Sam was deployed. Somehow, the Finch home has a way of drawing people back to it. It’s both reassuring and disconcerting that Edith’s return wasn’t the first time a Finch failed to escape.

Upon entering adult-Sam’s room, I’m greeted by a bear skin rug stretched across the center of the floor, the head of a buck mounted to the wall across from me, and a taxidermied cat posed upon a desk, paw raised, attacking a taxidermied squirrel. Hunting has filled the death-vacuum left in the wake of Sam’s departure from the military. The books filling his room’s shelves confirm this transition. Where Sam’s half of his childhood bedroom contained barely any books at all, adult-Sam’s room is filled with books about photography (Shutter), war (The General’s General, The Great War), the intersection of the two (P.O.W: Photos of War, Documenting Danger), and even books about reentry into civilian life (From Private to Parent, Returning Home).[56] It’s also worth noting that Sam owns a book called The Astronaut, presumably about his brother’s passion: space exploration, which is endearing considering how raw Calvin’s death likely still is for Sam.

Following a brief tour of Sam’s bedroom, I find a paper envelope filled with photographs. These were taken during Sam’s final hunting trip, one with only him and his daughter (Edith’s mother), Dawn. These photos are my gateway into Sam’s death story.

Sam’s death story is the only Finch death that is enshrined by Edie yet does not contain a written record. Rather, these photographs document the story. I peruse through the stack of photographs, with each photo capturing a moment from Sam and Dawn’s final hunting trip. But much like with Barbara’s comic book panel story, the player is still given agency during specific moments of the story. When I pull the first photo from the found stack, the camera flies into the scene, transporting me to the event. From there, I exchange perspectives between Sam and Dawn, with each viewing the scene through the camera lens. I’m allowed to move the camera viewport freely, and I can snap photos of the scene at will. The story I’m playing isn’t one of reflection but is a series of single moments; a canvas for reflection, but not reflection itself.

The ability to freely snap images of any view in a video game was novel at the time of What Remains of Edith Finch’s development. Though video games where photography is the main mechanic have existed for decades, going as far back as 1992’s Gekibo: Gekisha Boy and hitting peak popularity with Pokémon Snap (1999) and Fatal Frame (a series that debuted in 2001), What Remains of Edith Finch leans into the storytelling capabilities of the mechanic more than any of these games.[57] With Pokémon Snap the photography element was simply a clever elevation of the “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” Pokémon modus operandi. Instead of capturing Pokémon with a small Poké Ball, the image itself acts as the capture format. The Fatal Frame series had players snapping pictures of ghosts to excise spirits. Sam Finch’s story eschews the collection and combat angles of those games to instead put players into the role of literal story developer. Every image I take as young Dawn is instantly developed and printed to become one of the many images Edith would later cycle through. Every camera flash reminds me that I am Edith, looking through old pictures, before immediately falling back into Sam’s death story. With Sam’s story, the past and the present become one.

The relationship between Dawn and her father feels a lot like a typical teenage daughter and father relationship. Dawn isn’t interested in camping or hunting, but Sam insists the trip is important. “I’m not always going to be here,” he tells Dawn during one of her more angsty moments. “You’ll need to remember this stuff if you want to survive.”

Survival off the land during a time of relative excess in America seems like an extreme statement but remember Sam’s history: Death. War. And photography’s role in keeping the two ever-present.

The hunting trip culminates when Dawn, under pressure from her father, reluctantly shoots a buck with a rifle that she’s obviously uncomfortable holding. She cries. While her dad is proud of her, that pride, for Dawn, doesn’t seem to outweigh the sadness she feels over the killing.

Sam sets his camera upon a tripod to take a timed picture of the two of them, father and daughter, posing in front of the downed trophy. Dawn, perhaps persuaded by remorse and hope, comments that the buck is twitching, is still alive! Sam assures his flustered daughter that subtle, convulsive movements following a kill is normal. But in this case, he’s wrong. The buck isn’t dead. The massive animal jumps to life, knocking Sam over the cliff. Two brothers, both died by falling from a cliff, both because of arrogance.

Death possibilities:

● Kicked off a cliff by a buck

● None of the above

Gregory’s death

“Do you remember the way Gregory used to laugh, when he thought he was alone?” - Sam Finch

1976 - 1977, died at one year old

Sam and Kay’s marriage wouldn’t last. Kay became pregnant with Dawn just before Sam joined the military. The year following Dawn’s birth, Kay became pregnant with Gus. Shortly after Sam’s stint with the military, Sam and Kay moved in together and became pregnant with Gregory. Constant volatile change bullied them into conflict and inevitable demise.

The statistics speak to this as well. Forty-eight percent of people who marry before the age of 18 are likely to divorce within 10 years, compared to 25 percent of those who marry after the age of 25. Couples with one partner in the military experience an increased divorce rate by 6.9%. My own parents were part of this statistic. Married at 18. Father in the Navy. Though I was only five years old at the time of their separation, its impact bubbles to the surface every few years, and more so lately. My mother, whom I lived with as a child, has over the past several years succumbed to early-onset dementia. She forgets minor things. She hoards major things. A scheduled visit to her house, less than two hours from my own house, might end in my immediate return home because she forgot I was coming, and so was not at home when I arrived. But the divorce, something she rarely talked about before her diagnosis, has become a prominent topic of our too-infrequent conversations. I can honestly say that my father’s absence has been a blessing for me. His open drug use and general disinterest in responsibility would surely have arced the path of my childhood toward mimicked deviance. But my mother, who until her diagnosis largely agreed with me, has now taken to omnipresent guilt. Despite her own three mid-life adult children currently enjoying solid first marriages, my mother insists that her own failed marriage has broken us somehow. Gregory’s death, even if only superficially, feels like my own almost-death.[58]

Sam and Kay’s family is a strange puzzle, one not just reflected in their composition but in their housing as well. Dawn, Gus, and Gregory share what appears to be the first makeshift outcropping of the Finch house. If the Finch house silhouette was a giraffe, with the lower body being the original building and the neck and head representing the ad hoc extensions necessitated by Edie’s refusal to repurpose bedrooms, Gus, Gregory, and Dawn’s shared barracks would be the giraffe’s shoulders, as they leeched their way into the lowest vertebrae, where Dawn’s own children would eventually make up the Giraffe’s neck and head.

I discover the portal into Gregory’s death story written in the footer of Sam and Kay’s divorce contract, found propped against Gregory’s pillow in his abandoned crib. I lift the contract, Sam’s voiceover begins, and the scene fades to a first-person perspective of baby Gregory, in a bathtub, with Gregory’s tiny hand—now my tiny hand—gripping a toy frog. This is when it hits me; I am about to participate in the death of an infant.

Despite the visceral, human-avatar-killing spectacle that video games have traditionally championed, violence against child characters has largely remained taboo. But as video games become more sophisticated, narrative has been used to provide nuance and to largely neuter this taboo. Naughty Dog’s 2013 zombie apocalypse masterpiece The Last of Us took the decision entirely away from the player and killed off child characters in cutscenes, thus softening any complicity. The follow up, The Last of Us Part 2, would highlight the industry’s seven-year maturation by having the player character do something arguably more savage: kill a visibly pregnant woman (also during a cutscene).[59] Six years prior to The Last of Us’s release, Irrational Games’s BioShock applied a supernatural buffer to excuse child-murder. An enemy class called Little Sisters can be killed (or saved, per the player’s choice). These enemies have the appearance of young girls and narratively were, in the past, human girls. But questionable experimentation has altered their physiology so much that the game’s narrator offers the player a moral off-ramp: “they aren’t kids anymore.” Perhaps most famously, Bethesda Game Studios has traditionally taken a hard stance against killing child characters. In 2008’s Fallout 3, where every opened door potentially reveals a quick death at the hand of a rival faction, the makeshift, underground town of Little Lamplight is different. All the citizens are children. Upon entering this underground town, a veteran gamer would breathe a sigh of relief; there’s no danger here. I can’t kill them, so surely a fair game wouldn’t allow them to harm me. Bethesda Game Studios treated the children of its Elder Scrolls series the same way. When attempting to shoot a child character with a bow, the player’s arrow simply phases through the child, with not even a damage animation to validate the impact. The message is clear: we don’t condone violence against children.[60]

Such a stance, while easy to approve of from a public relations or ethical perspective, might compromise the “do video games encourage real-life violence” battle that the industry has been fighting since its inception.[61] Journalist Simon Parkin concludes in Game Developer, “in singling out and self-censoring one particular type of ‘crime’ in his game, [Bethesda Game Studios Lead Designer, Emil] Pagliarulo by implication justifies all the others as being non-gratuitous and necessary.” If video games are innocent, isn’t self-censorship an admission of guilt?

Perhaps. But, at least for Pagliarulo, self-censorship isn’t about whether killing child characters in a video game leads to violence against children in real life. Rather, the decision to eliminate killing child characters is a matter of context. Writing for Edge Magazine, in 2008, Pagliarulo states that the Fallout 3 development team had specific conversations related to killing children in the game, conversations “about whether you’re going to be able to blow the kids’ heads off,” but they thought, “really what benefit would there be in killing the kids in the game?”[62] Ultimately, the story, not player agency, drove their decision to make children characters invulnerable. “You really have to balance out and consider if doing violence to a child in a game is so important to your story that it outweighs any kind of social responsibility you might have.” Fallout 3’s story, he determined, wouldn’t benefit from giving the player the ability to kill children characters.[63]

For What Remains of Edith Finch, the child death I’m about to facilitate is imperative to the story. But necessity doesn’t make the act any easier.

_____

Character limbs, seen from the first-person perspective, have weight in the world of What Remains of Edith Finch. Given how little physical characterization is possible with a first-person perspective, arms and legs are a rare canvas to convey character traits and personality. Gregory’s arms and legs reveal quite explicitly—with their chubby girth, and stout digits—that I’ve inhabited the body of a very young child. This child is much too young to occupy a full bathtub without supervision.

To the game’s credit, it does quickly put some distance between me and Gregory. I retain control of Gregory for only a few seconds before the game shifts my control to Gregory’s toy frog. Suddenly I’m playing a third person game as a small, green frog with the camera fixed to the static head of a baby. I’m, as the player, now only watching the inevitable death, not participating in it. I must tell myself that this psychic distance is enough to keep me playing. You can do this, Caleb. You’re just a cute frog. You’re not the baby. Sony, the game’s publisher, did worry about how players would react to a baby’s death. “People [at Sony] who were parents were the ones who objected the most,” Dallas explains to Edge. “It was just about making sure that it was handled with the [appropriate] gravity and that it was respectful. That was definitely a concern early on.” A cute frog is always a good start toward “respectful,” I say.

The first few minutes of this new frog body are innocuous enough. I am encouraged to explore the controls, to get a sense of locomotion in this strange new water level. When exploring the toy frog’s move-set—swimming, diving, jumping—I inevitably collide with one of the foam letters, stuck against the bathtub wall, spelling out G-R-E-G-O-R-Y. With one letter down, I can’t help but knock down the rest. To my delight, once the entire name has been removed from the bathtub wall, I’m rewarded with a gold trophy, a sign of my PlayStation gaming prowess.[64] My broken brain believes this is the game’s way of acclimating the player to the inevitable death of an infant. “Cool, I just removed the verbal ‘Gregory,’ so maybe I won’t feel so bad removing the literal ‘Gregory.’”

Gregory’s mother, Kay, eventually enters the scene, announcing to Gregory that bath time is over, but before she can open the water drain, she’s distracted by a phone call. Still a frog, I am now, for better or worse, free to fully explore the bathtub without compromise. What unfolds is a brilliant example of measured game design. There are no tutorials here. There is no stated objective. I am simply allowed to explore a new move set, motivated only by fun interaction with other bathtub toys. I can not only knock down foam letters, but I can also pop bubbles and knock down the toys lining the bathtub rim. Kay returns, she drains the water, but before she can pull Gregory from the empty bathtub, another phone call from Sam pulls her away. Immediately, Kay and Sam’s argument soundtracks the scene.

Now Gregory sits safely in a bathtub devoid of water, but now I, still a frog, have a new interactable object: the faucet. I leap to the faucet, turning it on. The water flows. Playful exploration suddenly turns disastrous. I was, just moments ago, a video game player reflecting the curiosity of a child, exploring my world, experimenting with buttons, and suddenly this play announces a tragic end.

The next several minutes are a slow, tense build-up to the inevitable as the water level rises, a classical instrumental score grows, and Kay’s distracted, vocal anger punctuates the dread that I am, currently, unable to stop; the water level keeps rising no matter what I do.

This inevitability certainly helps distance me from the act. For every other Finch death, I’ve remained in full control. At any moment, I could have simply refused to progress. I could have simply put the controller down. But with Gregory’s story, there is no such luxury. Once the faucet is on, the water level rises without care. While the impending doom is real, I’m, thankfully, safe to feel innocent, unable to act against the evil whims of the game’s scripted scenario.

Once the water level reaches a critical depth, I’m pulled away from the literal scene and into a fantastical one, where I am once again in Gregory’s first-person view. Only this time, my arms are replaced with frog arms, and I am free to swim in the bath water. The scene remains beautiful, with the classical score building to its climax and bathtub toys dancing to the music in the water; a joyous ceremony despite what I know is actually happening: Gregory is drowning.

Gregory’s death is an incredibly tough scene to play, but more than any other death in the game, I’m relieved, happy even, that it exists. Edith’s voice actor, Valerie Rose Lohman, who wasn’t told during production that Gregory was an infant, was able to later experience this scene as a player and come away with a similar appreciation. “The bravery to go there shocked me a little bit, in a good way.” From shocked to appreciative. It’s a strange transition and one that few games attempt.

As a father of two young children at the time of What Remains of Edith Finch’s release, I empathize both with the parents and, of course, with Gregory. Children exacerbate existing conflict by introducing additional conflict. Both parents must together play a role that attempts to downgrade their own individual problems while sharing enthusiasm for the problems of an innocent, unknowing child. Every minor interaction becomes a tense one. But sadly, that very tension is what makes distraction so easy.

Death possibilities:

● Drowned in a bathtub

● Turned into a frog and swam away through the bathtub drain

● None of the above

Gus’s Death

“I can’t imagine my mom ever writing poetry, and yet…” - Edith Finch

1969 - 1982, died at 13 years old

One year after Dawn’s birth, and seven years before Gregory’s birth, Sam and Kay give birth to Gus. While only marginally a middle child Gus exudes the angst that popular media associates with pre-teen, second-sons of his age. He’s antisocial. He’s abrasive toward authority. He has a FREAKING MOHAWK! And from this, Gus becomes the only Finch family member to brazenly adhere to type. In a game so full of unique characters, Gus reeks of laziness.

Given how intentional the game’s direction has been so far, I must believe that Gus’s character has meaning beyond just fluff to extend the game. So, what could that meaning be? Edith finds, upon Gus’s bed, a poem written by Gus’s sister (Edith’s mother), Dawn. As we transition into Gus’ story, Edith comments, “I can’t imagine my mom ever writing poetry, and yet…” Gus, it seems, is merely a device to bring Dawn into further relief. This treatment isn’t much better than “fluff,” but a more rounded Dawn is welcomed, so I’ll acquiesce Gus’s role in the service of Dawn.

Gus’s story opens with him holding a kite reel, standing at a distance from a nearby wedding. Gus is not happy about this wedding. The game never digs further into Gus’ animosity but based on Dawn’s transcription of her brother’s words “We don’t need a stepmom,” it’s easy to interpret this terseness as a simple extension of Gus’s prescribed character type. Gus angry. Gus no like stepmom.

I steer the kite through the air as Dawn’s poem appears inscribed against the sky. I quickly learn that by crashing the kite into the words, the words break away and tangle themselves amid the kite’s wake. Without specific direction, I assume the role of the angsty pre-teen (and follower of clever game design direction) and break down the words completely. This clean-up makes room for more poetry. In the same way that the player must embrace an infant’s sense of play and wonder to advance Gregory’s story, here the player must embrace an angry young man’s drive to destroy for destruction’s sake.

Dawn’s poem tells the story of Sam’s second wedding, following his and Kay’s divorce. The beachside wedding, held just down the hill from the Finch home, quickly fell victim to a violent storm. While all other wedding attendees took cover inside a nearby tent, Gus remained defiantly outside and continued to fly his kite in the increasingly ravenous storm.

Gus’s story mostly serves to advance the growing tension between Dawn and her grandmother, Edie. Throughout the game, Edith allows me to forget Dawn and Edie’s fraught relationship. The two elders simply interpret the world from incompatible lenses. It’s easy to see their worldviews as mutually exclusive. But Gus’s death story reveals a possible reason why Dawn tries so hard to force distance between her and Edie: Dawn might blame herself for Gus’s death in the same way Edie might blame herself for Molly’s death.

Near the end of Dawn’s poem, she admits:

I wish that...

I wish that I could truly say

I thought about you on that day

Out there on the beach alone,
just you the wind the sea and foam

But I didn’t. Until we found you.

Their competing worldviews now merge into a Venn Diagram, with an intersection of guilt. If Dawn blames herself in part for Gus’s death, it’s possible she’s able to recognize the beginning of a new cycle, a new generation handcuffed by the Finch Family curse. But instead of using it to rationalize death, as Edie has done, Dawn begins to fight against it.

Death possibilities:

● Struck by lightning
● Hit by debris from a storm
● None of the above

Milton’s Disappearance

“Of all his creations, his greatest was himself.” - a placard beneath the statue of The King, Milton Finch

1992 - ???, went missing at 11 years old

Flash back to innocence. Back before Calvin’s story. Even before Molly’s story. Flash back to optimism. Return to the locked gate at the beginning of Edith’s story, where my entire world was what lay within view: the house, the broken asphalt, the house’s silhouette safely distant. And the only proof of recent human life is the missing person flier adorning a nearby utility pole, placed by people that have themselves moved on. I am just Edith (a person) and this flier (an artifact proving that a person once existed). This flier features Milton, Edith’s missing younger brother. The poster’s condition is surprisingly intact, a stark contrast to the surrounding decay, like it’s a beacon of resilience, of hope, amid the otherwise crumbling world. Missing, not dead. There’s hope with this type of ambiguity.

Once I first become Edith, after she’s climbed the perimeter fence, after I have taken a moment to absorb the failing home’s silhouette, after recognizing the one-way claustrophobic tunnel of foliage and asphalt aimed at that broken Finch home, a reasonable next attraction is that missing person flier nailed to a nearby wooden utility pole. In a world of human-made infrastructure reclaimed by nature during the previous seven years, the pristine angles of the “MISSING” letters does all the work that good level design needs to do: it attracts and guides. Its contrast broadcasts. It’s a light in the distance of an otherwise dark dungeon. It’s Mario, standing at the left edge of the screen in Super Mario Bros., just begging the player to press right, to fix the lopsided view, to center the world.

The posters feature Milton wearing a crown, a nod to Giant Sparrow’s previous game, The Unfinished Swan, in which Milton appears as a character referred to only as The King. In The Unfinished Swan the player controls a small boy named Monroe as he explores The King’s kingdom in search of a swan. The kingdom itself is Monroe’s own creation, built with the aid of a magic paintbrush. What The King paints appears as physical in the world. He builds a massive bell tower for himself, surrounded by an impossible labyrinth meant to keep everyone, including his own people, far, far away. During my time as Monroe, I learn that Milton’s reign is one less interested in ruling over the citizens and more interested in keeping himself secluded from them.

The relationship between The Unfinished Swan and What Remains of Edith Finch is hidden, with no overt mention of the name “Milton” anywhere in the first game. Ian Dallas himself had to confirm the connection, stating very directly in interviews and his Reddit AMA that Milton becomes The King in The Unfinished Swan. The implication is not just that Milton and The King are one, but that Milton Finch is the predecessor to The King, becoming The King only after disappearing from the world of What Remains of Edith Finch.

So, am I playing The Unfinished Swan as a dying child? The literal story of The Unfinished Swan details The King’s decline from failed recluse to a corpse, with the cause of his death remaining ambiguous. The two stories—Milton and The King—share waypoints that the armchair psychologist in me can’t ignore. First, The King’s impetus to build his kingdom stems from his first castle, a sandcastle, that the ocean’s tide stole from him. He’s hated the ocean ever since. It’s not hard to imagine Edie and Sven’s own sunken home, visible still at low tide, inspiring Milton to villainize the sea. Second, the labyrinth is a logical proxy for the secret passageways woven throughout the Finch home. Milton used them to keep people away, just as The King did. Then, there’s The King’s bell tower, seemingly modeled after Milton’s own bedroom tower which was built as a makeshift extension high above the Finch home. Finally, The King’s infatuation with a statute of himself reflects Edie Finch’s fascination with the legacy she has created. The King even says bluntly, “I was obsessed with my monument, something that would live on after me.”

The Unfinished Swan unfolds as an exploration of a person coming to terms with his impending death, like a terminal patient on a deathbed suffering a slow suffocation. And assuming Milton Finch’s disappearance isn’t magical, at least not as Edith describes his disappearance— “...the house just swallowed him up”—then did Milton get trapped within his own house’s winding, hidden passageways? Is The Unfinished Swan the story of Milton’s growing delusions as he slowly dies?[65]

I’ll say this: I don’t believe that a healthy 11-year-old mind could write what the King writes in The Unfinished Swan: “Then suddenly, I was alone again. The world had become cold and dark. I felt my own death rising up around me.” No young child, unaided by existential panic, could recognize his own finality so acutely: “When the universe ended, I knew that everything I’d made was over.”

Milton’s crown, and his mysterious disappearance, connects the overt fantasy of Milton’s black and white The Unfinished Swan kingdom with the mysterious world of Edith’s Orcas Island, a world yearning to be tethered to reality. Edith’s mission, my mission, is to uncover that tether. This mission is more difficult than any of the other Finch deaths. As Edith herself says, “My brother disappeared when I was 4. It’s like the house just swallowed him up.” And so, from the beginning of Edith’s journey, I am primed to believe in magic. Missing children are, sadly, a reality in the real non-game world. We say “missing” to keep the child anchored to reality, to inspire hope for a resolution, but really what’s the difference between “missing” and “disappeared?” Milton’s posters highlight a real-life example of the tension caused by casual use of magical terms to calm a non-magical mind.

Milton’s disappearance is easily the most ambiguous of all the Finch deaths and is therefore the most discomforting. Perhaps this is why Milton’s death is the event that finally prompts a simply defiant Dawn to become an actionably enraged Dawn. Edith says, “mom spent months searching for my brother. Then she sealed the doors. Whatever Milton had found in the house, mom didn’t want it getting out.” Before Milton’s disappearance, Dawn could dismiss her family’s deaths as a series of unfortunate coincidences. But with Milton’s mysterious disappearance, Dawn’s reality became challenged. “Unfortunate coincidence” doesn’t satisfy “mysterious.” But “curse” does.

Milton’s is the only “death” whose ambiguity isn’t related to the cause of death but instead to whether there even is a death. His is the only event without a body, without finality. It’s not surprising that Milton’s disappearance is the event that brings Dawn to leave the Finch home permanently. Milton’s is the one “death” that Dawn cannot resolve, that gets too close to legitimate myth. Without a body, there is no arguable resolution. Dawn can’t explain this away which forces her to at least entertain Edie’s curse. Edith says of her mom’s behavior, “my mom wasn’t much of an optimist, but she never stopped believing that my brother Milton was alive.” In fact, Dawn refused to include a tombstone for Milton in the family cemetery, instead insisting upon a monument.

During the early game, the missing person posters act as the only tangible evidence of Milton having ever existed. It isn’t until Edith discovers the hidden passageways within the home that I’m forced, by the game’s critical path, to validate Milton and the secrets he’d kept. That first hidden transition between rooms, from Walter’s childhood room into Molly’s room, is littered with Milton’s art supplies, and the raw wooden walls are tagged with his paintings. Even here, even forced by the game to acknowledge Milton’s existence, he still occupies an ethereal presence, literally on the walls and floor at the periphery of my world. Milton’s illusive existence remains mysterious even through his death story. Where every other Finch death story asks me to embody the family member in some way—with Milton’s story I’m allowed only to engage with one of Milton’s flipbooks, titled “The Magic Paintbrush.” Here I see Milton only as a black-and-white caricature of his own creation, and still as a two-dimensional, barely realized drawing, just as I did with his own passageway wall-scribbles, and just as I did on those flat, missing person posters. As I flip the pages in his flipbook, this cartoon version of Milton paints a life-sized door, through which the cartoon Milton steps, before closing the door. The cartoon Milton has exited into another world just as the real-life Milton ceases to be.

Death/missing possibilities:

● Runaway

● Trapped within the Finch home’s hidden labyrinthine tunnels

● Disappeared

● None of the above

Lewis’s Death

“My brother was really cool. I wish you could have met him.” - Edith Finch

1988 - 2010, died at 21 years old

I sometimes wonder, how would Edie paint my legacy if I were a Finch? Maybe:

“Caleb’s novel killed people.” - Edie Finch

Killed? Probably not. I’d compromise that the book, at worst, may have ruined a few dinners. That book, my first novel called Stranger Will, is a dark story about an overbearing matriarch with wild ideas about legacy. She butts heads with a young person who fears the impact that his imminent parenthood will have on the world. Sound familiar? This was almost two decades before I’d meet the Finch family. It seems I was primed to connect with What Remains of Edith Finch’s dark themes of Birthright as Burden.

I wrote much of Stranger Will in college, as a young 20-something, while working in the produce corner of a worldwide department store chain. One of my many jobs was to inspect newly-arrived food for imperfections. And such imperfections were plenty. I’ve found dead stowaway spiders tucked deep into green banana bunches. I’ve found cardboard bins of watermelons with a wet ring circling the base, the tell-tale sign of rot. Agitating even a single melon meant collapsing the entire palette into the hidden soupy mess underneath. I’ve unearthed multiple generations of fruit flies, thankfully driven to retreat in the back room before they have a chance to nest in the multi-colored wonderland out on the sales floor. But often, I’d ignore the decay, instead commandeering my role as inspector to repurpose my clipboard adornment as a handy hard surface to write fiction. Most of Stranger Will was written in the produce cooler, hidden safely behind the closed refrigerator door, as I feigned checking the quality of cantaloupes and strawberries. The quality of my handwriting, I remember vividly, faltered to the cold air as my fingers sacrificed their blood to keep my heart satiated.

The stealth act proved beneficial. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. The repurposed inspection checklist housed my output, though only temporarily. Inevitably the words spilled to the reverse blank white side of the paper as well. Eventually, I bypassed the template entirely, opting to clip only blank printer paper to the board. At the end of a shift, my pants pockets bulged with folded output. As a family of worms remodel the interior of a pear, protagonist William Lowson’s existential dread hardened under the tutelage of my Edie Finch stand-in, Mrs. Rose. Customers shrieked as they found a worm’s hole in an apple. I smiled as I patched a plot hole in my story.

I’m sure the data exists somewhere that correlates an increase in customer complaints with an increase in Stranger Will’s page count. But did that book kill anyone? Probably not. But Edie could twist anything just right.

Lewis Finch and I have a lot in common. He too molded his day job into a liminal space between dueling lives. He too found a routine at work that he could fall into. But while I escaped, Lewis did not.

Lewis is a pothead. This much is clear. Black light-reactive posters line the walls, one proudly proclaiming his desire to “Legalize Marijuana.” A large hookah claims the center of the room, surrounded by paraphernalia. Though Lewis’s drug use seeds the cause of his inevitable death, his drug use is projected as an endearing personality trait, not as a moral failure. Lead Artist, Brandon Martynowicz, acknowledges that the room’s entire design comes from a good place. “A lot of the things that went on in [Lewis’s room] were pulled from a lot of fun childhood experiences,” he says. “I was a super stoner pothead kid. My buddy had this shed outside of his house—it’s like an old tool shed type thing—turned into his little pot-smoking den. And we had those neon lights. We had the black light. We just had a boombox that we would use to listen to Cypress Hill and Pink Floyd.” Edith appreciates the curated ambiance and the lingering scent of marijuana: “Lewis’s room smelled very, very familiar. That part of him lived on.”

I enter Lewis’s story via a letter written by Lewis’s psychologist, Dr. Emily Nuth. The letter opens with the doctor’s sympathies—Lewis had recently died during a shift at a local fish cannery, and of course she regrets the loss. But quickly the letter pivots into a detailed post-mortem as the doctor tries to balance the facts of Lewis’s death against her insistence that Lewis left a positive impact. He’s dead, sure, but what a beautiful life he lived.

Why such insistence? Simple compassion, perhaps? Or, as the letter implies, Dr. Nuth has a selfish reason to celebrate Lewis’s life in lieu of dwelling on this death: she feels partly responsible for his death.

The letter acknowledges that Lewis’s downward spiral began after he got sober, a state she’s responsible for achieving: “Newly sober, I believe Lewis first noticed the monotony of his daily life,” the doctor writes. “I spoke with his boss. But he said Lewis had become a model employee. Methodical, tireless, focused… Like a whole new Lewis. So I let him go on.”

Dr. Nuth’s response to the death reflects Edie’s own response to Molly’s death. “I let him go on,” she says, just like Edie permitted Molly’s death. And much the same way that Edie divorced herself from responsibility following Molly’s death, Lewis’s psychiatrist spends a full page in her letter repositioning Lewis’s downward spiral as not resulting in a death, but as resulting in the wonderful cultivation of Lewis’s endless creativity, for which he should always be remembered. The legacy is more important than the life.

Dr. Nuth ends her letter with a flat, simple, almost insulting platitude: “Mrs. Finch, your son was a kind man who will be missed by all of us who knew him.”

Until now, we could dismiss Edie’s belief in the curse as an artifact of her wild imagination. But with Dr. Nuth’s endorsement, the curse gains a foothold in the world of science.

_____

Lewis’s story is a favorite among players. It is, topping even Calvin’s story, the most interesting in terms of mapping the player actions to the character actions. Where Calvin’s story allowed me to discover how to swing in a swing set by coordinating the dual thumbsticks as I would coordinate my own legs, Lewis’s story asks me to think like a man unable to coordinate his mind with his actions.

I begin simple enough: I’m looking, from Lewis’s perspective, down to a metal container where dead salmon, ready for processing, end up after riding an off-ramp from a nearby conveyor belt. Using the right thumbstick, I grab a fish with Lewis’s right hand. I then maneuver the fish to the right, stopping beneath a ready guillotine. Then chop. Grab the fish. Slide the fish. Decapitate the fish. Repeat.

Grab the fish. Slide the fish. Decapitate the fish.

Grab the fish. Slide the fish. Decapitate the fish.

I quickly embody Lewis’s boredom. The game isn’t a game, at this stage. My only burden is rote movement. While there are slight efficiencies to be made—grab the fish more quickly, move the fish faster, avoid a fish-corpse backup where too many fish bodies clog the guillotine’s path—the loop is, quite honestly, not fun.

The lack of fun is intentional, of course. The game is lulling me into a false sense of security, of comfort. This is a task that requires no thought. This task is purpose-built to let the mind wander.

And just as I edge beyond patience and into boredom, Dr. Nuth introduces me to Lewis’s fictional world. “He kept working at the cannery, but he withdrew part of himself,” she writes. “His mind began to … wander,” and with that my view of Lewis’s metronomic routine is infiltrated. A thought bubble poofs into existence, overlaying the center-left of my view. From within this bubble, my heretofore unused left thumbstick now controls a small knight moving throughout a rudimentary maze. The top-down view and ultra-basic geometry are reminiscent of a world we might see from 1980’s Atari game Adventure.

Just as Lewis’s mind splits, my mind is also forced to split, with my left hand controlling the knight character and my right hand controlling Lewis’s still-dedicated guillotine hand. Initially, most players will have difficulty controlling the two bodies simultaneously. I’ve subjected many friends to first-time playthroughs of the game, on the condition that I’m allowed to watch silently and take notes. This mechanical bifurcation in Lewis’s story is responsible for a lot of notes, mostly versions of “hahaha, I knew they wouldn’t be able to do it.”

The common approach to Lewis’s story is to flip between bodies. First, slowly; move the knight a few steps, then behead a fish. Repeat. Second, more quickly, with more steps, and multiple fish at each cycle. Eventually, the player is able to cope with true simultaneous control. Either that, or the player flips between bodies so quickly that the mind believes in simultaneous control, believing that occupying two simultaneous states is possible. I’m resolving two truths as one, just as Edie insists.

Lewis’s story is a natural extension of the mapped movement I experienced with Calvin’s story. But while Calvin’s story allowed me to control two limbs of a single body using inverse kinematic animation principles to ensure the body itself honored the movement of the limbs, Lewis’s story decouples the bodies entirely. One entity has no impact at all on the other.

As Dr. Nuth’s letter proceeds, so does Lewis’s fantasy. The simplistic 1980’s Adventure-like presentation evolves into a detailed isometric style more closely reminiscent to 2000’s Diablo. As the visuals mature, the size of the fantasy intrusion grows. What started as a small thought-bubble—barely a nuisance—grows to fill half the screen, then grows further, large enough to squeeze out Lewis’s right hand entirely. Eventually, the fantasy dominates everything, just as the visual style matures further into a fully-realized first-person presentation, aligning with the actual presentation of What Remains of Edith Finch proper. At this point, the first-person movement that the game had taught me for the preceding playtime is reintroduced. I’m now controlling Lewis’s fantasy avatar. The only direction is forward, much like Edith’s own ascension toward the Finch home at the start of the game. By this point in Lewis’s fantasy, avatar-Lewis had built cities, defeated dragons, conquered armies, and now he is ready to be championed as the true king over all the land. The ascension to the crown is hopeful. This is the position fake Lewis worked hard to achieve.

Every king must be crowned. I move Lewis to the throne. Dr. Nuth continues: “There was only one thing left to do. Bend down his head.” With his head down, neck exposed, I hear a sudden chop! “And the rest I think you know,” Dr. Nuth says.

Lewis Finch died in a fish cannery. The sterile and plausible version: he killed himself with a fish guillotine. The magical and improbable version: his imagination created such a powerful proxy that real life—and the real danger associated with it—couldn’t compare to the glamor of his fiction. His death then becomes almost noble, as the avatar he feels comfortable with outlives the real Lewis that he simply endured up until the moment of his death.

_____

Lewis’s mother, Dawn, and his great-grandmother, Edie, have rarely gotten along. But despite their many differences, Dawn remains attached to the Finch home. While she has had brief periods of distance—she moved to India a week after her college graduation and spent the summer building houses in Calcutta—she’s unable to stay gone for long. When her husband (and father to Lewis, Milton, and Edith) died, Dawn returned to the Finch home. The influx of four new bodies meant the Finch house had to expand its horizon-piercing spire to accommodate. The extended family, with its extended house, fell into a comfortable routine. Edith says, “For a while things were good. Almost normal. But it didn’t last.”

Dawn and Edie clashed often, eventually culminating in Dawn once again leaving the Finch house, this time with her surviving child in tow. The breaking point was Lewis’s death. Why? It’s worth acknowledging how Lewis came to work at the fish cannery. His mother, Dawn, got him the job. It’s no wonder then that, perhaps racked with guilt, Dawn makes the decision to move out of the Finch house as they drive back from Lewis’s funeral. Dawn and Edie have their own different, but similar, reactions to their roles in the family deaths. Where Edie insulated herself from guilt by celebrating death, Dawn prefers to run away.

Death possibilities

● Cuts off his own hand and bleeds to death
● Cuts off his own head
● None of the above

Edie’s Death

“Dear Edith, there’s so many stories I wish I could tell you, but there’s only time for one. This is about what happened the night you were born.” - Edie Finch

1917 - 2010, died at 93 years old

Of the 13 family members Great-grandma Edie has shared a house with, she has outlived 11 of them. With a ratio like that, it’s hard not to consider that maybe the world simply has no need for the Finch lineage. Call it a curse. Or call it bad luck. Either way, the outcome is the same: the Finches die, but the world keeps turning. The world wins. It always does.

The solution—if I can be heartless enough to call it that—is to embrace death. Once every Finch is gone, isn’t the curse gone, too? Edie and Dawn, despite their mutual anger, would have to agree on this one grisly fact. But because they cherish self-preservation over all else, thus showing that neither Dawn nor Edie can be dismissed as simply apathetic, they then each respect the curse in different, substantial ways. Dawn fears it while Edie feeds it. Dawn runs from it. Edie befriends it.

Edie’s death story begins as the remaining family—Edie, Dawn, and Edith—eat their final meal together. Not surprisingly, they’re dining on food from the one restaurant that delivers to their secluded home. A single oil lamp illuminates the table, casting harsh shadows from the Chinese food cartons. With young, 11-year-old Edith as the only living pawn, Edie and Dawn delicately dance around their battle plans. But only briefly. Edie reveals that she knows about Dawn’s next-day escape plans.

Edie then reveals her plan: Edith will carry forth the curse. “Edith,” Edie says, with the quiet confidence of a military Commander. “I left a present for you in the hallway. Why don’t you go open it? The grownups have to argue now.” Edith excuses herself from the table and heads toward the hallway.

Edie’s command is brilliantly constructed. See, the present isn’t in the hallway. But importantly, from the hallway, Edith sees that a secret entrance to the sealed-away Finch library is open. This is an entrance that until now only Edie knew about. Crucially, now that Edith also knows about this entrance, the battlefield tide has turned in Edie’s favor. What child can reject a secret passageway?

Once through the secret door, the library proper reveals the only pristinely organized collection of books in this house lousy with toppled stacks and disheveled mounds. These library book spines share decorative detail and widths, indicating that these aren’t simply stand-alone volumes, but are true collections of work. If I think back to one of Edith’s earliest statements— “Edie told me once that every Finch who ever lived is buried somewhere in the library”—I can now interpret the library as Edie’s most official documentation of the lives of her dead family members. The library is a containment vessel for the curse specimen and upon its breach, Edith has become Patient Zero for a new outbreak.

Edith approaches her present: a hand-bound book titled History of the Finches. Though the title purports to capture the grand legacy of the entire family, it opens with a direct address to young Edith from Great-grandma Edie: “Dear Edith, there’s so many stories I wish I could tell you, but there’s only time for one. This is about what happened the night you were born.” Fade to the past to a younger Edie Finch on that night her great-granddaughter was born…

_____

An earthquake from somewhere in the distant sea pulled back the waters from the Finches’ shore. The lowest tide in 1,000 years, Edie writes. It was the first time, and the last time, Edie would see her original transplanted house resting upon solid ground. For every single day otherwise, all Edie knew of her sunken childhood house was a red-light buoy warning passing ships of the submerged building. Some days, Edie might be lucky enough to see the highest peaks of the lost house pierce the ocean’s surface. But to see the front gate again, to see the porch steps, to walk in the front door again for the first time since she was a child, the opportunity must have been exhilarating.

With the water having receded, decay and stink festered. All sea life had turned beached. Edie navigates her way through the surreal maze of rocks and death, underwater but not, swimming but not. This is as close as anyone could get to breathing underwater.

The fog rolled in. Edie got lost. She started seeing things, “things I’d forgotten had ever existed,” she wrote, “That night a lot of things came back to me. Or maybe, I came back to them.” And at that moment, Dawn discovers young Edith in the family library. She grabs her daughter’s gifted book. They struggle, each pulling at opposite ends of the book, each, in essence, fighting for rights over the Finch legacy.

But the book splits in two. Edie’s desire to influence Edith is left lingering, never fully resolved. A spirit born of unresolved tragedy, now left to wander for closure. The event quickens Dawn and Edith’s escape; that very night they would leave the Finch house. “I never saw great-grandma Edie again,” Edith says.

The getaway is tense. Edie yells from the porch, warning of dire consequences as Edith and her mother drive away. Seven years later when Dawn dies, Edith returns, with a key and an unborn child.

Edie died the morning following Edith and Dawn’s departure. A van from the nursing home arrived to carry her away, but she was already dead. She lived just long enough for Edith to get hooked by the family curse, reeled in by the stories. Maybe the perpetuation of the curse, now allowed to incubate in a new, young mind, is what allowed Edie to finally die.

Death possibilities

● Mixed alcohol and prescription medication
● Old age, and all that it entails
● None of the above

Dawn’s Death

“My children are dead because of your stories!” - Dawn Finch

1968 - 2016, died at 48 years old

Following their escape from the Finch house, Dawn and Edith spent six years alone together. They moved around a lot. Their nomadic lifestyle stands in stark contrast to the static, secluded lives they had previously led. Where before they stayed aggressively thatched to a single foundation, they now found themselves untethered. Home, for them, for so long, was a single place. How would they find “home” again? How would they even know home again if they found it?

The game doesn’t overtly tell me much; however, I do know that Dawn had yearned for the outside influence that this new lifestyle certainly provided. She would have relished this opportunity to show the world to her sole surviving daughter. Dawn knew the importance of worldly education. Her own travels to India are telling enough, but even her defiance during her stay at the Finch house projects a person uncomfortable with her prescribed, cloistered life. Even in the confines of the Finch home, Dawn built a portal to the world. Her own bedroom in the Finch house leads to a single-room schoolhouse. If I can trust the order of the Finch house additions as correlating to need, it’s clear that Dawn prioritized education. The classroom comes before even Edith’s and Lewis’s own bedrooms.

Dawn’s classroom is the only place with actual schoolbooks. Math books. Geography books. Hard sciences. The message is clear: the stories of our ancestors have no place in Dawn’s curriculum. While she cannot control her family’s remote geography, nor her grandmother’s influence, she can at least defend against encroachment with a well-stocked classroom.

A few years pass. Dawn’s health degrades. The game doesn’t detail what sickness brought Dawn to her deathbed; only that Edith is with her as she passes. In her will, Dawn leaves the key, the game’s inciting object, to Edith. Why would Dawn want her daughter to return to the Finch house? Maybe a deathbed change of heart? When confronted with the finite, maybe belief in the infinite comes easier.

Death possibilities

● Undisclosed illness

Edith’s Death

“And then I was alone. The last Finch left alive.” - Edith Finch

1999 - 2017, died at 17 years old

Following Lewis’s death story, I ascend further up the Finch spire to Edith’s abandoned bedroom. Edith is home. Her own books. Her own ceiling, decorated with origami birds. Her own space, frozen in time for seven years. Dear Christopher, here is where your mother grew up.

This space sits precariously atop the highest peak of the Finch house. The fragile architecture tempts a slight breeze to bring Edith’s entire world crashing down upon Lewis’s and Milton’s world below her, upon Dawn’s and Gus’s and Gregory’s world below that, upon Barbara’s and Calvin’s and Sam’s and Molly’s and Edie’s world below that, and upon Walter’s world below that. Let’s say things were different, that Dawn and Edie never split, that Edie still lived, that Dawn still lived. Eventually, pragmatic concerns would have forced a literal change in direction. Building another room for Christopher atop Edith’s own dangerous spire seems a ridiculous demand, even for Edie. Practically speaking, Edie had to die. The house had no more room for her stories.

I place Edith on her childhood bed. She reclines into her pillow. She opens a blank journal, the same journal that, once full of ink, will open the game at Christopher’s lap in the ferryboat. Edith writes. This simple act, pen to paper, affirms Edie’s still-present influence. Earlier, when Edith walks through the Finch family’s backyard cemetery, she acknowledges that she probably shouldn’t be writing this journal for Christopher, that maybe the stories should die with her. But she stops short of commitment. Why prescribe a resolution when Christopher’s existence is statement enough against a resolution? The curse is inborn. Legacy is the Finches’s legacy. She writes, “I probably feel as lost as you do right now. I think the people in these stories believed them, for what that’s worth. And when you look at the house … at that history of imagination, and stubbornness and madness, any of it seems possible. I think we’ve been surrounded by death for so long we’ve just gotten used to it.”

Without the prospect of a new death, what’s the point of living?

_____

Edith’s sudden death caps a much deeper life than her few 17 years would imply. At every step, Edith paints her world in vivid imagery. She observes through a lens tuned to the magical while always keeping herself bound to the real. She is, after all, a product of Edith and Dawn. And her voice, it feels always strained by those opposing forces. When she says, “I had questions about my family that only the house knew the answers to,” I can hear the words fight for purchase within Edith’s tight throat. When she says, “looking in, I felt like the house itself had been waiting for me,” her voice quivers like she’s stumbling through the illogic in real time. When she says “Edie told me once that every Finch who ever lived is buried somewhere in the library,” the words trickle out hesitantly, unsure if they themselves want to be born into a world as surreal and as haunting and as silent as Edith’s world. Edith’s voice actor, Valerie Rose Lohman, is a conduit bringing life both to Edith and to the world around her. Perhaps Valerie’s delicate treatment of Edith, as a person who feels a bit like an intruder, owes something to Valerie’s own imposter syndrome. At the time of What Remains of Edith Finch’s development, Valerie was early in her video game voice acting career. Valerie’s career had spanned TV, theater, and film; never video games. Not a gamer herself, Valerie’s conception of video game voice acting was informed mostly by over-the-top quips from Mortal Kombat.[66] Her brother, the gamer in her family, had to explain to her what a walking simulator was. “I went into this completely in the dark, but I think that was a good thing… I would have been really overwhelmed and stressed if I realized how important this game was.”

Valerie’s trepidation works. If I were to dismiss Valerie’s skill and professionalism for a moment, her performance as Edith leaks a quiet trill of nervous tension, like young Edith herself is forever auditioning for her own role as a human being. Valerie exudes an appropriate nervousness with Edith. Ian Dallas and the team left a lot of room for Valerie to find this balance of imposing confidence and meek youth. Valerie tells me that the character description she received for Edith was atypical, to say the least: “‘she’s like a storm on the horizon that may never reach the shore.’ That is the weirdest way to describe a 17-year-old, but I also understood that.”

Given the nature of the game’s story, concrete guidance for its actors couldn’t have been easy. How much do you reveal about the narrative, when the very purpose of the narrative is to be ambiguous? Do you lie to the actors? Do you give them false details, enough to cheat a final product out of them? Or do you, as Ian would do, play into the ambiguity and give Valerie the same information that Edith would have access to? Why burden the actor with irrelevant details? Why ask the actor to parse fact from fiction? Does it matter that Valerie, the actor, can rationalize Lewis’s kingly ascension among a crowd of faceless citizens and a giant cat when Edith, the character, admits to her own inability to divine truth? “It’s unnecessary to explain that much to the actor. At the end of the day, the core of that [scene] is that your brother is dead,” Valerie tells me. “I think I would have been trying to piece together what you mean. There’s a cat King? Like, what? I think I would have been deeply confused if they tried to explain it to me.”

Valerie wasn’t the only member of the team asked to wade through some confusion. Lead Artist Brandon Martynowicz depicts the final stages of development as a stressful time. How do you resolve a story about the impossibility of resolving a story? How do you follow a series of increasingly strange deaths with the death of the main character? How will any path not feel trite by comparison? The answer: simplicity. If Edith dies during Christopher’s birth, then let the player experience Christopher’s birth. “I do remember [the vagina ending] being alluded to … in one of the leads’ meetings,” Brandon tells me when I ask about Christopher’s birth scene. During this scene, the player views the world through Christopher’s eyes as mid-birth baby pulses through Edith’s birth canal. The muffled ambient audio trickles and echoes like the player is at the bottom of a swimming pool. The vaginal walls glow by the slit of light at the end of this pink and purple tunnel. “It was four of us. Me, Sarf [Joshua M. Sarfaty, Technical Director], Ian [Dallas, Creative Director], Chelsea [Hash, Lead Technical Artist], and we were just talking about how we need an ending for this game. Then Ian just threw [the vagina idea] out there. I was like ‘dude, I can whip up something real quick.’ … And then I was like, ‘dude, this has never been done before.’ I don’t think I’ve ever seen a video game where you get to move through a vagina... It was one of the weirdest things I ever had to model, that’s for damn sure.”

As I coax Christopher toward the light, Edith continues reading. “This journal was supposed to be for you. But now I hope you’ll never see it. I just want to meet you and tell you all these stories myself. But I guess if you’re reading this now … things didn’t work out that way.” Blinding white light overtakes the entire screen. “This is where your story begins. I’m sorry I won’t be there to see it.”

For the first time, and only time, in the game, the camera pulls out of the first-person perspective. I’m floating above Christopher as he reads his mother’s journal. He closes the book and places flowers at Edith’s grave in the Finch family cemetery.

Death possibilities:

● Complications while giving birth to Christopher

Nine: Almost Dead

“To our final night together... and all our final nights apart.”

-Edie Finch

For a while, this story had no end.

For a game that goes so far to avoid conclusion, had What Remains of Edith Finch fizzled without a narrative end, I could believe it all as intentional. Without its universal praise, its awards, without its legacy, What Remains of Edith Finch would have become its own antithesis, and in doing so perhaps still would have cemented a legacy despite itself. That’s the curse, I suppose: the curse is inevitable.

But game publishers don’t sell curses. Curses don’t pay developers, don’t feed families, and don’t build resumes. Game publishers need games to sell, and for a while, What Remains of Edith Finch was unsellable. The game, like its depicted family, felt cursed.

When Sony agreed to publish What Remains of Edith Finch, the PlayStation team had already built a reputation for producing narrative-rich experiences with unique mechanics. Nathan Gary, then a Creative Director at PlayStation and later President of Annapurna Interactive where he would work with Giant Sparrow on What Remains of Edith Finch, had worked on many of these stand-out examples: Flower (2009), a game in which the player brings color to a world by guiding a flower petal throughout a colorless world; Journey (2012), a visually stunning third-person action game that incorporates multiplayer features to connect strangers in narratively-thematic ways never done before; Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (2015), a walking simulator where the player explores a quaint English town following an apparent religious rapture; and Bound (2016), a personal favorite of mine that lets the player embody the graceful movement of a professional ballerina amid the memories of various tense events from her life. Gary had even worked with Ian Dallas on Giant Sparrow’s previous game, The Unfinished Swan (2012). Giant Sparrow and PlayStation were a perfect match.

For most of What Remains of Edith Finch’s development, that perfect match remained manifest. The team met development milestones consistently and approvingly. “As long as we were hitting our milestones, [Sony] would keep the doors open, keep paying us, and everything was moving along really swimmingly for the first two years,” Lead Artist Brandon Martynowicz tells me. But then came the end of the game. Or, more appropriately, then came the lack of an end.

As an author of character-focused fiction, I can vouch for the simple truth that endings are hard. Unlike formulaic genre fiction, there is often no clear-cut audience expectation and therefore no clear-cut, logical end to a story. The death of a villain doesn’t cue resolution. There is often no single hero with a single, concrete goal whose attainment allows the author to dust their hands and scribble out some bow-tying denouement.[67] Fiction that, as is the case with What Remains of Edith Finch, aims not to dictate a single response but instead to evoke incomprehensible feelings, is hard to cap off in any satisfying way.[68] This difficulty is especially so for a story that, by its very nature, questions the validity of story itself.

Ian attempted various bow-tying styles. He tells me that the original ending of the game was going to be a riff on the Mark Z. Danielewski novel, House of Leaves. He spent six months trying to make that story work before abandoning it. Though the conceit of the novel is simple—there’s a house whose interior dimensions are mysteriously larger than its exterior dimensions should allow—anyone familiar with the story knows that the 709-page novel is inspiring, yes, but does not inspire with clarity. With its footnotes nested multiple layers deep, its swirling text, and its references upon references upon references, the task to both 1) take inspiration from the House of Leaves and 2) convey the product of your inspiration to a team of game developers with enough precision and intelligibility to instill confidence is certainly difficult, perhaps impossible. “We were close to the end of this project and [Ian couldn’t] come up with the ending,” Brandon tells me. “He was really holding on to this, his baby. It was an onion. It was a layer within a layer within a layer. No one on the team even really understood the ending that he was coming up with, and it just wasn’t working.”

Ian himself acknowledges the difficult reality of a team unable to fully comprehend the story he was trying to tell. “In our case, not having any idea what the story should be until you’re almost done making the game [was a challenge]. We don’t start out trying to tell a story. We’re trying to evoke feelings that we ourselves don’t entirely understand, like ‘what I remember about being on a swing set as a child,’ and the story doesn’t come until the game itself is pretty far along.” And if the story doesn’t come until the game is “pretty far along,” the ending can only come even later than that.

So came a missed milestone. Though the game was playable through to near the end of the game—the scene in Edith’s room at the peak of the Finch house—the full game loop wasn’t yet complete. And without a complete loop, and with another missed milestone, Sony eventually stopped funding the project.

The head of the external development team at Sony approached Ian and asked him into his office. "It was one of those meetings that come out of the blue that can go a lot of different ways,” Ian said. “And I looked around the room and was like, ‘why are all these other people joining us for this meeting too? Uh oh’.” Since Ian and his team weren’t able to end the game’s story, Sony would have to force the end. Sony told Ian that they would no longer be funding What Remains of Edith Finch. Development was to cease immediately.

Nathan Gary picks up the rest of that event during an interview with me. Gary, an 11-year veteran with PlayStation, had been working with Annapurna Pictures to create a dedicated gaming group called Annapurna Interactive. From that executive office, freshly feeling the death of his game, Ian is walked into a conference room next door where he’s told by Gary that Annapurna Interactive wants to continue making the game. From one room full of doom directly into another room full of hope.

All great news, right? Giant Sparrow would have a fresh batch of time and resources to focus, so the team would be able to breathe a bit easier and continue development with renewed energy, right? Not quite. The team had to move out of Sony’s Santa Monica office quickly, but because the deal with Annapurna Interactive was not yet finalized, the Giant Sparrow team wouldn’t yet have dedicated office space. The temporary conditions between Sony’s office space and Annapurna’s office space weren’t ideal. “We went from Sony Santa Monica’s beautiful studio to this tiny little shoebox in Venice Beach,” Brandon tells me. “I had an umbrella that I taped to my desk that covered my monitor so that I wouldn’t get the glare from the sun beaming down. Behind me was a closet with racks where the build-farm was, and the light build machines, and this thing’s blowing hot air… One bathroom for 12 dudes. That was really fun,” Brandon says with dry sarcasm. “It got pretty hairy there for a minute. There was a good chunk of a couple of weeks there where nobody was paying Giant Sparrow, and we had 13 developers on staff at that time. Ian had to dip into his savings for one pay cycle.”

Eventually, the Annapurna Interactive deal was finalized, everyone moved to better accommodations, and the team felt more comfortable with their new space and their new partners. Brandon tells me, “I think I can speak for a lot of those people that definitely were very attached to this project … we just had to wrap it up and make sense of an ending. When we moved into this new place [with Annapurna Interactive], I think it was kind of a blessing in disguise. [Annapurna Interactive] weren’t breathing down our neck saying you guys have got to finish this now. It’s like, ‘okay, we’ve acquired you guys, you guys now have a little bit of room to relax and just figure this thing out and make it good’.”

Ian would concur, stating that the switch to Annapurna Interactive worked out very well. “In the months leading up to [the switch from Sony to Annapurna Interactive], a lot of our friends who used to work at Sony had moved over to Annapurna. A lot of those folks [we] had been working with on Edith Finch for several years at that point, so I think they felt like (a) this was a game that would be a really good fit for Annapurna, and (b) they had some confidence that they (and we) could pull it off. In a way, staying at Sony actually would have been stranger, since we would have had to get used to a whole new set of producers.”

On December 1st, 2016, Annapurna Pictures announced the creation of Annapurna Interactive along with plans to release four games, which would become Gorogoa, Wattam, Florence, and of course What Remains of Edith Finch, which was to be the company’s first release. As a brand-new publisher, Annapurna Interactive would come to appreciate What Remains of Edith Finch as a calling card, of sorts, a way to show the world what kind of games they aim to create.

And as it relates to the Giant Sparrow team, Nathan expressed to me a sense of relief that all the work on the game was recognized. Here was a “rag-tag crew who went through a lot of adversity,” to make this game and to help show the world that video games can be life-changing experiences for players without having to be mechanically complex. “Give a controller to anyone who doesn’t play games, and it might as well be a complex instrument that you have to learn all about before playing it,” Nathan tells me. “We want to make a game that doesn’t require such complexity.”

In a world of saxophones, Annapurna Interactive makes a kazoo. “The most beautiful kazoo you’ve ever seen,” he’s quick to point out.

I agree. And What Remains of Edith Finch is easily the most beautiful kazoo I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing.

Dear Christopher #5

Dear Christopher,

Did I ever tell you about the man with three faces? He taught me how to draw naked people back in 2001. He showed me his three faces at the same time once, during a college drawing course, and I’ve never stopped thinking about them. I’d seen each of his faces independently, for months, with each face’s set of eyes revealing its purpose as the situation called for it. Two white slits for the embarrassed face (when I submitted a terrible drawing for grading), wide balls of white glass for the proud face (when I proved to the professor my comprehension of perspective), and those whites buried by waves of folded forehead skin for the lost face, the confused face, the worried face, all three versions of the same (when I submitted work that broke away from his strict instruction). That last face did a lot of emotional lifting.

But that one day, when he revealed all three faces at the same time, I staked a claim to his intention. I saw six eyes at once, and so I was forced to (I felt forced, anyway) make sense of them. I chose the excited face, but honestly, it doesn’t matter what I saw.

See, after meeting your mother, I started to wonder if there was an intention at all, if there was even a real and true look. Have I simply fed his three faces’ possibilities long enough that now I feel responsible for them; and to concede that responsibly means to concede a bit of my own purpose? The death of a lie, maybe, but still the death of my own creation. It’s hard to let go of your own creation.

Speaking of which, what about you? Are you dead yet? I probably should have asked earlier. Here I am, doing the same as your mother. Instead of letting the past die off, I’m cuffing it to the page. Typical gamer, right? All agency is mine; you’re just a non-playable character, a creation not my own, but a creation I stake a claim to, nonetheless.

So, what’s your path (scripted or otherwise)? Where do you go from here? Do you worry about inclines in the level terrain? Does your pathfinding drive you to clip into environment geometry? Do you dole out fetch quests for heroes? Sorry, I’m just having some fun.

I cling to video game worlds as a compulsion, refusing to even consider that video game worlds aren’t real. I map my life in tune to the changing of console generations. I retrace my life along the evolution from pixelated characters to motion-captured adults outfitted in ping-pong balls playacting adjacent a Foley stage where serious adults twist stalks of celery to capture the sound of a snapped ulna. Without video games, my life’s map would lack its most important waypoints. The fiction of video games informs my reality, even if only to keep me tethered to it. And I like that. I appreciate it. Reality isn’t limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs, Christopher.

Maybe “reality” is defined by its impact, not by its existence. That art professor’s look, whether it actually existed as some verifiable event documented according to courtroom minutes doesn’t matter. If I accept the look, then its existence is moot. My life changed either way. I have changed.

That undefinable face is my own Edie Finch myth, and with it, I think I understand why Great-great-grandma Edie was so drawn to the mythical and why most of your family was so unwilling to deny it. Perhaps we cling to myth because, despite its objective non-reality, it is stable. The world of science has a single, ever-guiding rule: negatives cannot be proven. This mantra pushes science to engineer better experiments, to articulate stronger hypotheses, and to eventually further our understanding of a world that defies complete understanding. There’s always a “what if” remainder. Nobody can prove that your Great-grandaunt Molly wasn’t eaten by a monster. Nobody can prove that your Great-granduncle Calvin didn’t fly away. Sure, the evidence at hand would suggest both of these are false, but the evidence at hand is always limited. A complete understanding of anything is impossible. Science accepts this, and so, science leaves us grasping for resolution. Science, in this way, is unstable. Science is always looking to be proven wrong. It wants to be defeated. A myth is relentless. Myth accepts the unknown. There’s comfort in that. And I believe people deserve to be comfortable.

It’s hard to let go of your own creation. Even Ian Dallas, the closest you and your mother have to a god, he had troubles too. Ian seemed paralyzed by the prospect of capping off his creation. Right up until the very end of What Remains of Edith Finch’s development—of building your world, Christopher—he was daunted by what would become your mother’s final words. He says about Edith’s last line, “...I just feel it’s really manipulative to have something that is consciously trying to pull at your heartstrings like that. It’s ultimately unnecessary and kind of shoddy. For me, it starts and ends with empathy—it’s about creating a space where you are encouraged and allowed the time to feel empathy for someone else.”

So, at the risk of saying something unnecessary and shoddy, let me just say thank you for indulging in this myth with me.

Your friend,

Caleb

Notes

In some instances, quotes have been modified for grammar or clarity with care to not compromise their integrity.

Portions of this book originate from interviews I conducted with the following people:

- Ian Dallas, via Google Meet, in March 2018

- Brandon Martynowicz, via Google Meet, on 4 February 2020

- Valerie Rose Lohman, via Google Meet, on 10 June 2022

- Nathan Gary, via Google Meet, on 30 September 2022

One: On the Path

Jimmy Fallon calls What Remains of Edith Finch “one of my favorite things” on the 18 September 2019 episode of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon during an interview with Tyler "Ninja" Blevins.

Katherine Dunn's comment about Portland accumulating “fugitives and refugees” via:

Palahniuk, Chuck. Fugitives and Refugees: a Walk Through Portland, Oregon. Crown Journeys, 2003.

“There is nothing in the world I like more than pure underground music” via:

Kelly, Christina. “Live Nirvana Interview Archive.” Live Nirvana!, 12 January 1992, https://www.livenirvana.com/interviews/9201ck/index.php (accessed 23 March 2023)

Two: Let’s Go for a Walk

Alternate names for walking simulators via:

https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/40t142/discussion_walking_simulator_feels_unnecessarily/ (accessed 23 March 2023)

Ian Dallas’s comment about “walking simulator” as a description via:

GiantSparrow. “Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!).” Reddit. 19 Jul 2017. https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/6oa6wr/comment/dkfs563/ (accessed 23 March 2023)

The walking simulator’s origins via:

Mason, Graeme. “The origins of the walking simulator: A step back in time.” Eurogamer. 13 November 2016. https://www.eurogamer.net/the-origins-of-the-walking-simulator (accessed 23 March 2023)

Comparisons of the walking simulator to other media via:

Denby, Lewis. Honest Gamers. 8 February 2009. http://www.honestgamers.com/7778/pc/dear-esther/review.html (accessed 23 March 2023)

“Without puzzles, the visuals and narrative are allowed to take precedence” via:

Thursten, Chris. “Dear Esther Review.” PC Gamer. 13 February 2012. https://www.pcgamer.com/dear-esther-review/ (accessed 23 March 2023)

Dan Pinchbeck’s comment about having nothing but story to keep a player engaged and his comment about getting away with designing a game as a mood piece via:

Cameron, Phill. “Interview: Moved By Mod -- Dear Esther's Dan Pinchbeck.” Game Developer. 1 July 2009. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/pc/interview-moved-by-mod----i-dear-esther-i-s-dan-pinchbeck (accessed 23 March 2023)

Three: Surrounded by the Magical and the Surreal

Ian Dallas’s comment about scuba diving as a kid and his comment about finding the game dull after a couple of minutes via:

Batchelor, James. “Why Giant Sparrow built What Remains of Edith Finch without a detailed plan.” GamesIndustry.biz. 19 July 2017. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/why-what-remains-of-edith-finch-was-built-without-a-detailed-plan (accessed 23 March 2023)

“More than 80 percent of the ocean has never been even seen by humans” via:

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/ocean/ (accessed 23 March 2023)

Ian Dallas’s comment about the difficulty with telling a story while scuba diving and his quote “an abstract but describable goal” via:

Schilling, Chris. “The making of What Remains of Edith Finch.” PC Gamer. 2 June 2018. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-making-of-what-remains-of-edith-finch/ (accessed 23 March 2023)

“Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” via:

David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, Random House. 2004.

H.P. Lovecraft’s definition of weird fiction via:

Lovecraft, H.P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx (accessed 23 March 2023)

Michael Bell’s issues with the term “magical realism” via:

Bell, Michael, Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude and Solidarity, St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

The conversation between Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Plinio Apuelyo via:

Apuleyo Mendoza, Plinio; García Márquez, Gabriel, The Fragrance of Guava, Faber and Faber Limited. 1983.

Dear Christopher #2

The news story about the car wreck can be found via:

Garcia, Carlos. “Man Who Jumped From Highway Flyover Taken To Local Hospital.” KWTX. 20 November 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20141123205946/https://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/Man-Who-Jumped-From-Highway-Flyover-Taken-To-Local-Hospital-283421071.html (accessed 23 March 2023)

Four: Welcome to the Hub World

Chris Bell’s comment about balancing player agency and Ian Dallas’s comment about using text as a stopgap solution via:

Wiltshire, Alex. “How What Remains Of Edith Finch guides players with words.” Rock Paper Shotgun. 9 October 2017. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/how-what-remains-of-edith-finch-guides-players-with-words (accessed 23 March 2023)

Five: Welcome Christopher

Ian Dallas’s comment about Chelsea Hash’s dream of showing the body via:

Schilling, Chris. “The making of What Remains of Edith Finch.” PC Gamer. 2 June 2018. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-making-of-what-remains-of-edith-finch/ (accessed 23 March 2023)

The claims about BioShock bringing environmental storytelling to the mainstream are substantiated via:

Lawardorn, Damien. “The Rise, Fall, and Place of Environmental Storytelling in Games.” The Escapist. 27 January 2020. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/the-rise-fall-and-place-of-environmental-storytelling-in-games/ (accessed 25 March 2023)

Chelsea Hash’s comments about getting Edith’s gloves into the game via:

Carpenter, Nicole. “‘What Remains of Edith Finch’: The Knotted Tale of Those Hand-Knit Gloves.” Rolling Stone. https://web.archive.org/web/20180127225858/https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/edith-finch-wears-its-heart-in-its-hand-knit-gloves-w515762 (accessed 25 March 2023)

Lilly Wachowski’s comments about the films being a transgender metaphor via:

Netflix: Behind the Streams. “Why The Matrix Is a Trans Story According to Lilly Wachowski | Netflix.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adXm2sDzGkQ (accessed 25 March 2023)

Six: The Birth of the Curse

Ada Juke stats via:

Robinson, G. Wilse, M.D. “The Causes and Prevention of Insanity.” Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association, Volume 8, Issue 12, June 1912, pg 470

The claim that Dugdale’s findings would fuel a eugenics movement are substantiated via:

Christianson, Scott. “Bad Seed or Bad Science?” The New York Times. 8 February 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/arts/bad-seed-or-bad-science.html (accessed 25 March 2023)

Ian Dallas’s comments about having the same locations and characters reappear via:

Schilling, Chris. “The making of What Remains of Edith Finch.” PC Gamer. 2 June 2018. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-making-of-what-remains-of-edith-finch/ (accessed 23 March 2023)

Ian Dallas’s comments about the relationship between the stories and the relationship between the people via:

Matulef, Jeffrey. “What Remains of Edith Finch director Ian Dallas reflects on his unforgettable family drama.” Eurogamer. 28 July 2017. https://www.eurogamer.net/what-remains-of-edith-finch-director-ian-dallas-reflects-on-his-unforgettable-family-drama (accessed on 25 March 2023)

Seven: Answers in the Library

Ian’s comments about stories based on “The Library of Babel” and House of Leaves not gelling via:

Giant Sparrow. Twitter. 8 February 2018. https://twitter.com/giantsparrow/status/961686042796474368 (accessed on 8 February 2018)

Google’s mission to organize the world’s information via:

Google. “Our approach to Search.” https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/ (accessed 25 March 2023)

Pinchbeck’s comments about his William S. Burroughs influence via:

McMullan, Thomas. "Where literature and gaming collide: How games are mining literary sources of inspiration.” Eurogamer. 27 July 2014. https://www.eurogamer.net/where-literature-and-gaming-collide (accessed 25 March 2023)

Eight: The Deaths

2006 University of Toronto study via:

Raymond A. Mar, Keith Oatley, Jacob Hirsh, Jennifer dela Paz, Jordan B. Peterson. “Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds.” Journal of Research in Personality. Vol. 40. 2006. Pgs 694-712.

2013 paper via:

David Comer Kidd, Emanuele Castano. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind.” Science. 3 Oct 2013, Vol 342, Issue 6156, pp. 377-380

Poe’s denouncement of stories buoyed only by superficial meaning via:

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69390/the-philosophy-of-composition (accessed 25 March 2023)

Richard Wilbur’s comments regarding Edgar Allan Poe’s conception of art via:

Wilbur, Richard. "The House of Poe". In Regan, Robert (ed.). Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 1967. p. 99.

Wanlin Li’s comments about ambiguity via:

Li, Wanlin. “Ambiguity as Aesthetic Strategy: Edgar Allan Poe's Ambitions for the American Short Story.” Journal of Narrative Theory. Vol. 48. Issue 2.

Derrida and the zombie via:

Collins, Jeff. Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide. Icon Books Ltd. 2014.

Ian Dallas’s quote “I honestly don’t know” via:

“Special Episode: Interview with Ian Dallas, Creative Director of ‘What Remains of Edith Finch.’” Byte Me Podcast. 19 July 2017.

Ian Dallas’s comments about Molly’s story being an introduction to the players via:

Schilling, Chris. “The making of What Remains of Edith Finch.” PC Gamer. 2 June 2018. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-making-of-what-remains-of-edith-finch/ (accessed 23 March 2023)

Ian Dallas’s comments about the failed wall-less system in Molly’s story via:

Schilling, Chris. “The making of What Remains of Edith Finch.” PC Gamer. 2 June 2018. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-making-of-what-remains-of-edith-finch/ (accessed 23 March 2023)

Ian Dallas’s comment about wanting to cut the shark scene via:

Matulef, Jeffrey. “What Remains of Edith Finch director Ian Dallas reflects on his unforgettable family drama.” Eurogamer. 28 July 2017. https://www.eurogamer.net/what-remains-of-edith-finch-director-ian-dallas-reflects-on-his-unforgettable-family-drama (accessed on 25 March 2023)

Valerie Rose Lohman’s frustration at the developers’ unwillingness to divulge details via:

BAFTA Guru. “‘I... Recorded My Audition On My Phone’ | Valerie Rose Lohman on Game Acting.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKxQL4YzD2U&t=253s (accessed 25 March 2023)

Ian Dallas’s comments on Walter’s story via:

Schilling, Chris. “The making of What Remains of Edith Finch.” PC Gamer. 2 June 2018. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-making-of-what-remains-of-edith-finch/ (accessed 23 March 2023)

Statistics about divorce via:

“Divorce Statistics: Over 115 Studies, Facts and Rates for 2022.” Wilkinson & Finkbeiner. https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/ (accessed 25 March 2023)

Nintendo’s aversion to using the world “kill” in strategy guides via:

Walsh, Doug. The Walkthrough: Insider Tales from a Life in Strategy Guides. Snoke Valley Books. 2019.

Simon Parkin’s comments about singling out one particular type of “crime” via:

Parkin, Simon. “Opinion: ‘Fallout 3 - I Kill Children.’” Game Developer. 31 October 2008. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/pc/opinion-i-fallout-3-i---i-kill-children- (accessed 25 March 2023)

Emil Pagliarulo’s comments about killing child characters in his games via:

Pagliarulo, Emil. “Emil Pagliarulo Writes for Edge.” Edge. 26 October 2008. https://web.archive.org/web/20081031004813/http://www.edge-online.com/blogs/emil-pagliarulo-writes-edge (accessed 25 March 2023)

Ian Dallas’s comments about some people objecting to Gregory’s death via:

Schilling, Chris. “The making of What Remains of Edith Finch.” PC Gamer. 2 June 2018. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-making-of-what-remains-of-edith-finch/ (accessed 23 March 2023)

Ian Dallas’s comments about Milton being The King in The Unfinished Swan via:

GiantSparrow. “Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!).” Reddit. 19 Jul 2017. https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/67hhyx/comment/dgqoa4f/?context=3 (accessed 23 March 2023)

Ian Dallas’s comments about The King being a “pretty one-to-one” proxy for himself via:

Shamoon, Evan. “Whitespace: The Man Behind ‘The Unfinished Swan.’” Polygon. 9 October 2012. https://www.polygon.com/2013/1/24/3655056/whitespace-the-man-behind-the-unfinished-swan (accessed 25 March 2023)

Nine: Almost Dead

Ian Dallas’s comments about not knowing what the story should be until it’s almost done via:

GiantSparrow. “Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!).” Reddit. 19 Jul 2017. https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/67hhyx/comment/dgqn8rh/?context=3 (accessed 23 March 2023)

Ian Dallas’s comments about meeting with the head of external development at Sony, and his comments about the benefits of working with Annapurna as it relates to the people he’d be working with via:

GiantSparrow. “Official AMA with Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow (What Remains of Edith Finch, which is now available on XB1!).” Reddit. 19 Jul 2017. https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/67hhyx/comment/dgqf79p/?context=3 (accessed 23 March 2023)

Ian Dallas’s comments about Edith’s final words via:

Schilling, Chris. “The making of What Remains of Edith Finch.” PC Gamer. 2 June 2018. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-making-of-what-remains-of-edith-finch/ (accessed 23 March 2023)

Thanks

Many, many people made this book possible, the least of which are the creators of What Remains of Edith Finch. Thank you to all the team members who made this life-changing game possible and especially to Ian, Brandon, Valerie, and Nathan for chatting with this bumbling idiot of a fan.

Thanks to Boss Fight Books for showing me that an entire book about a single video game is possible.

Thanks to the What Remains of Edith Finch Fandom wiki for helping me to keep all the Finch birth dates, death dates, and ages in check.

Thanks to Brock Wilbur, Reyan Ali, and Eddy Rathke for their early encouragement.

Thanks to Jay Slayton-Joslin, Joel Boyce, S.R. Narcensio, Pam D, Tim, Chad Garvin, Dylan, Vayar, and Travis for properly tearing apart a draft of this book that I thought was nearly complete.

About the Author

Caleb J. Ross is an author and a lifelong gamer whose fiction and non-fiction have appeared widely, both online and in print. As a hobbyist indie game developer and video game obsessive, Caleb has produced hundreds of visual essays, editorials, and comedy videos on YouTube and has co-hosted many video game podcasts with the goal of evangelizing for the video game medium, a medium that has changed his life.

Find all the links and such at https://calebjross.com/

Notes

[←1]

I want to be careful not to conflate all of the Pacific Northwest with just Portland, Oregon, as the city is uniquely weird (rivaled in notoriety perhaps only by Seattle, Washington, just 170 miles north, which is itself 100 miles of coastal and ferryboat travel south of Orcas Island, the proper setting of the game), but this focus is necessary in order to understand the Finches. Their home is a lone beacon of mystery secluded amid dense forests and bays in the very Northwest corner of the Northwest region. The home is a soup cracker of strange within a bowl of weird amidst a full table of normalish.

[←2]

Walk ‘em ups itself is a take on the genres shoot ‘em ups (whose hyphenate genre might be wave-based-space-shooter-action game) and beat ‘em ups (whose hyphenate genre might be wave-based-combat-focused-action game).

[←3]

Ask Me Anything. This is a style of Reddit thread in which subject-matter experts answer questions from the public.

[←4]

Dear Esther was later released commercially in 2012.

[←5]

Gamasutra was renamed to Game Developer in 2021.

[←6]

And relevant to our discussion of war, Higinbotham was also a member of the team that developed the first nuclear bomb. Really.

[←7]

“Alien” is of course relative. In the traditional verb-establishing previous levels, Mario stomps on turtles and toad people, actions that if approached with our real-world lens would be equally as alien as bobbing through water (with infinite oxygen, while dodging murderous fish and squids).

[←8]

Interestingly, the original Super Mario Bros. 2 (later released in North America as Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels) goes full-on meta with this idea by incorporating mushrooms that kill rather than help (as the first game taught players) and level warps that send the player backward to previous levels rather than forward to further levels (as the first game taught players). The game’s legacy, at least in North America, is one of frustration rather than wit. Hence, the much easier Super Mario Bros. 2 that we received in North America.

[←9]

Which I assume represents the primary video game-playing species.

[←10]

Excluding for fun, of course. Game designers often err on the side of fairness over reality, using such techniques as “coyote time” (ie, allowing the player to remain grounded for a few frames following a ledge) or “jump buffering” (ie, allowing the game to register the press of a jump button a few frames before the player actually touches the ground). Such design tricks are so prevalent that when a game lacks them, playing the game feels objectively bad.

[←11]

I assume. I admit, I haven’t yet submitted my grant proposal to fund this study.

[←12]

The rise in popularity of virtual reality gaming is subject to this same proprioceptive conflict. For as many players credit the real-time mapping of image to body for exciting, unparalleled immersion, just as many players blame this connection for their resulting motion sickness. Hey VR makers, we just want to feel like we’re actually getting heel-stomped by Lady Dimitrescu in Resident Evil Village! We don’t want a bit of nausea, too. That’s just cruel.

[←13]

Which is where I’d like to stay, thank you very much.

[←14]

Bonus: explosions and blood often make for easier marketing.

[←15]

I’m not a psychologist, but as a close-minded thalassophobe I’m quite comfortable with my use of “sociopathic” here.

[←16]

Great-grandmother matriarch = Gabriel Garcia Márquez?... No, you’re right, the shared initials are not intentional.

[←17]

Referred to as Gypsies in the original English translation.

[←18]

Though, I am willing to engage in a conversation about Chinese food being more important than the shared Roma technology. Nobody needs telescopes, magnets, and ice before sesame chicken, Kung Pao chicken, and wonton soup.

[←19]

Japanese Role-Playing Game. The genre’s roots, though Japanese, have exploded worldwide and have informed game design for all types of role-playing games.

[←20]

But no character stat manipulation or skill trees, unfortunately. Though, given Edith’s earlier surmount of the perimeter chain link fence, she’s likely maxed on dexterity already, anyway.

[←21]

Opponents of this theory claim that Molly could not have fallen out of the window because we see her in her bed, writing in the journal from which the player is reading. To those opponents I say, forget your tomatoes and eggs!

[←22]

The Legend of Zelda series

[←23]

Resident Evil 2

[←24]

Elden Ring

[←25]

I made this one up, but it probably exists.

[←26]

Literally. Edith’s words appear as text against the physical contours of the house, fading in slow, like they are scabs struggling to close re-opened wounds.

[←27]

Heads Up Display. Or Hyper Ultra Deluxe, if you’d rather think of the UI elements as super rad.

[←28]

Literally. Once Edith enters the home through the doggie door, the player is unable to have her exit. Ian Dallas told me that this is due to streaming issues, meaning the game itself must dump data from its memory to allow the house’s interior to load. It’s the same reason the player can’t move Mario past the left edge of the screen in Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I want to place more weight on this inability to remember preceding events as a commentary on What Remains of Edith Finch’s message of psychological inheritance, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

[←29]

Given the role of the Finch house and the curse it helps sustain, maybe we are headed for an island prison.

[←30]

Correction: nobody says this.

[←31]

The Stanley Parable was later released commercially in 2013.

[←32]

Some might call it a walking simulator.

[←33]

About 15 team members during development, according to Ian Dallas. By comparison, big-budget, so-called AAA games are often built by teams numbering in the hundreds.

[←34]

Hash’s influence on Edith’s character extends beyond the simple existence of a body. Edith’s intricately knitted gloves are also a result of Hash’s passion. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2018, she says with a laugh, “I went to parties with the publisher, and I stayed there late at night when everybody’s drinking and I’m like, ‘Nathan [Gary]! Nathan, important! Ian thinks it’s going to be too hard, but [the hands] are the only thing that’s worth it.’” I don’t disagree. The gloves are mesmerizing.

[←35]

We can assume the Finch legacy is widely known. In addition to the View-Master sequence described here, multiple books can be found throughout the house with titles that seem to document this legacy. Examples include The Finch Curse and The Finches: A Falling Flock. But like with all Finch family artifacts, it is possible these books too are whims of Edie’s fantasy.

[←36]

Or the “whatever your last name is” if it makes you feel good about your family’s safety protocols.

[←37]

It’s important to reiterate that the game never affirms the actual causes of any of the deaths. I am making inferences here based on context provided in the game.

[←38]

Disregarding that “entry” is by way of the second story window, then yeah, it’s normal.

[←39]

But only about 250 unique titles. Each title is duplicated multiple times to comprise the thousands of books scattered throughout the house. Like the aforementioned concessions made regarding the accuracy of the book’s girth, the books’ duplication was not a creative choice but rather a practical one based on the ever-present specter of time. Ian wanted a larger variety of books, but it wasn’t feasible. “If you look, you can find duplicates,” Ian tells me, “But it’s much better than it used to be.”

[←40]

To further the meta-textual fun, the story appeared in a collection called The Garden of Forking Paths. The stories in story collections, by their nature, are generally valid no matter the order they are read, making Borges’ story of multiple possibilities both an awakening to the impossible as well as a dismissal of it.

[←41]

It’s even been argued that Borges is the originator of the hypertext storytelling format, and in being so possibly helped to establish the understanding for what would become the World Wide Web. I wonder if Google was a fan when they wrote their mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

[←42]

A monkey, given infinite time and a typewriter, could randomly peck at letters until eventually every book ever written (and assumedly, books yet to be written) would be produced. Borges himself would trace this concept all the way back to Aristotle in his 1939 essay entitled “The Total Library.” Aristotle probably got the idea from some shithead monkey with an inferiority complex.

[←43]

And who among us hasn’t been reading a book only to suddenly suffer the existential awakening that we’re basically just eyes and a finger? And even worse, suffer the shock that we’re satisfied with being only eyes and a finger! We exist as mostly just baggage and accessories!

[←44]

Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta and The Unfortunates by B.S Johnson would go even further with this conceit by discarding the physical book binding entirely. These books are essentially stacks of playing cards meant to be shuffled prior to reading. They are not for me. I draw the line at books that can lose pieces in the same way I don’t attempt to play Monopoly without its board. Though, I suppose without the game board to distract me I’d be more likely to catch Cheater Doug stealing property cards and yellow twenties.

[←45]

And thus, birthing the lawyer profession.

[←46]

It’s not uncommon for an Evenson story to start with a murder and then ask the reader to remain hitched to the murderer’s perspective as they rationalize the event and deal with the aftermath. Evenson’s characters rarely express remorse.

[←47]

And if we can read into Wilbur’s term “unearthly visions,” we might also better understand the impetus of Poe’s rumored drug addiction.

[←48]

Years later I would discover a love for programming and video game development. My brain welcomed the binary logic immediately. You’re off the hook, Ian.

[←49]

Remember, Edith is pregnant. I’m convinced more and more that the Finches aren’t cursed unless you can call a complete unawareness of safety a curse.

[←50]

Treyarch is one of the studios responsible for the annualized juggernaut Call of Duty series. Brandon himself had worked on Black Ops 2, its DLC, and also on Black Ops 3.

[←51]

Crunch is used to describe a period of elevated workload, generally toward the end of a game’s development, where developers work significant overtime.

[←52]

Brandon told me that the characters each had gone through many different names over the course of development, so “Calvin’s story,” though true to the final state of the game, would not have been called “Calvin’s story” at the time of his interview. I like to imagine that at that time the character of Calvin was actually named Swing, and therefore “The Swing Story” is simply a reflection of the team’s hyper-efficiency. But I often imagine stupid things.

[←53]

Before Your Eyes would go on to win a BAFTA Game Beyond Entertainment award in 2022, an award that “recognize[s] the best game that capitalizes on the unique and maturing medium of games to deliver a transformational experience beyond pure entertainment -- whether that is to raise awareness through empathy and emotional impact, to engage with real world problems, or to make the world a better place.” Good call, BAFTA.

[←54]

With the possible exception of Milton’s story, which isn’t actually explored much in What Remains of Edith Finch but instead gets proper screen-time in Giant Sparrow’s previous game. The Unfinished Swan extends the story of Milton Finch following his disappearance during What Remains of Edith Finch.

[←55]

YouTube channel The Game Theorists, in their video “Game Theory: The Curse is a LIE! (Edith Finch),” suggests that the monster Walter fears is Edie herself. The video’s arguments are compelling but are ultimately uninteresting to me. Edie as a literal serial killer feels much too superficial considering how much time the game spends away from Edie. This theory would also indicate that Edith’s death is purely coincidence (since it happens after Edie’s death), thus fracturing my confidence in the Edie-as-Mastermind angle.

[←56]

Though perhaps not always healthy reentry. The titles of the books Home Defense and Hunker Down imply a degree of paranoia surely fueled by his war-focused early adulthood.

[←57]

I’d be remiss not to at least acknowledge the explosive popularity of photo modes in modern video games. A photo mode allows the player to freeze the game at any time to use the screen’s real-estate as a viewfinder for taking in-game screenshots. Photo modes have evolved since their initial introduction in the mid-2000s to allow for various styling manipulations, certainly inspired by real-life photo-mode: Instagram.

[←58]

During the writing of this book, I received a phone call from my mother with the news that my father died. Days later, she sent me his obituary. I realized when I saw his obituary that I’d never known his middle name nor his birthdate. He’s always been a stranger, and only in death he is a bit less so.

[←59]

Though the player character doesn’t actually know the victim is pregnant until after the victim is killed, the player does know. Rendering this narrative point more fraught, the player isn’t allowed to not kill the pregnant character. Yeah, I have issues with The Last of Us Part 2’s balance of agency and storytelling.

[←60]

Though not specific to child characters, Nintendo, always the beacon for family-friendly gaming, even restricted use of the word “kill” in strategy guides about their games. They never authorized a strategy guide for their classic Super Mario Bros., which is a shame because the game’s instruction manual itself alludes to Mario’s mass genocide of the citizens of the Mushroom Kingdom. The Koopa gang turned all the citizens into bricks, the very bricks that Mario is known for destroying regularly. Maybe destroying the bricks “frees” the Mushroom People in the same way that veterinarians “free” terminally ill dogs.

[←61]

Sadly, we’re no closer to ending this debate than we were when the debate began. Alexander Kriss, PhD, in his book The Gaming Mind: a New Psychology of Videogames and the Power of Play examines the many attempts to study the impact of violent video games, ultimately concluding that research methods used were often corrupted, rendering the results misleading at best and dangerously false at worst. Kriss highlights the research’s general lack of external validity, which means games simply weren’t studied in the environments in which people actually play games. This is a problem for science but not a problem for headline-hungry politicians and news media outlets eager to demonize video games from the moral high ground.

[←62]

Earlier installments of the Fallout series did allow children characters to be killed. These games were not developed by Bethesda Game Studios. But similar to the Bethesda Game Studios’ iterations, violence against children didn’t go unacknowledged. In Fallout and Fallout 2, killing a child brands the player with the title “Childkiller,” and with that comes a series of penalties to the player stats in addition to a change in the world-state: bounty hunters will begin to appear on the world map. Even professional murderers in video games disagree with killing children, so much that they will murder you for doing it.

[←63]

Pagliarulo also notes that the ESRB (the Entertainment Software Rating Board, which assigns rating categories based on age appropriateness for sale in the United States) was a concern, though he doesn’t state directly that killing child characters is a specific ESRB pain point.

[←64]

Most major gaming platforms allow developers to include such tokens of accomplishment. These tokens are often independent of the game’s in-world player goals, meaning developers can extend the gameplay for players who want it. I imagine Giant Sparrow was aiming to do anything in this scene to make the experience a bit less heartbreaking.

[←65]

Ian has said that The King character is a “pretty one-to-one” proxy for himself. So, if Ian ever goes missing, check the walls of his house for hidden passageways.

[←66]

If I had the power, I would absolutely fund Valerie Rose Lohman doing a full VO for every Mortal Kombat game. I now dream of hearing “Finish Him” in Valerie’s, as she says, “morose, sad girl voice” that she brought to Edith.

[←67]

None of this is to suggest that writing genre fiction is easy. Often, finding creative ways to both honor audience expectations regarding genre tropes while also surprising the audience is incredibly difficult. Maybe that’s why I’ve kept such a safe distance from writing genre fiction over the years; I’m not good at surprises.

[←68]

Boo!... See, I told you I wasn’t good at surprises.