1. What Remains of Edith Finch commits many of what I consider cardinal sins of narrative game design and yet it is still really good. I have put some considerable thought into this and the only explanation for this is that it's just really good.
2. Game developers take note: if you want a positive review of your narrative game, just make sure it's really good. Simple!
3. The general gist of what's going on: You, Edith Finch, have arrived at your ancestral homestead after some time away. It becomes clear early on that you are the last surviving member of you family and that nobody has been to this house in a very long time. You begin exploring and the strange history of your clan is laid out before you as you progress. This is exactly what you expect will happen and that's fine.
4. Yes, this is a game where you walk around until it is time to stop walking around. It is furthermore almost completely on rails and there is neither challenge nor any real decision making involved. Usually when I run into such things, I immediately dip my proverbial acid pen in its well and proceed to scrawl a massively negative review for my eager fanbase to devour, only temporarily sating their furious appetite for my cerebral game-related blog content.
5. The game is divided almost episodically and each segment is presented differently not only graphically but w/ different gameplay mechanics. As you explore your old house, you come upon each of your deceased family members' bedrooms and learn the stories of their demise from either their own perspective or that of another family member. This provides just enough of a hook to pull you into each bit individually and prevents the feeling you are just wandering randomly for a few hours while the game spoon feeds you a backstory.
6. The section for Barbara Finch impressed me especially w/ its interactive comic book feel--so much so that I am dedicating prestigious point 6 just to this fact.
7. Edith's house is an especially unusual building w/ giant DIY additions jutting out haphzardly above it. Once inside, you are presented w/ boarded up rooms connected by twisted secret passages and the fractured disarray of a place left in a panic. The scene is rather creepy but also quite alluring and the way the game entices you through the house makes it feel like you are making the decisions of where to go next. It is a carefully planned impression of chaos designed to draw you in.
8. The thing I noticed most about the sound design were those segments where there was no music playing. The score was lovely, to be sure, but adept use of silence can be just as important.
9. The world Edith resides in seems much like our own yet there are elements of magic and fantasy that seem to possibly pertain only to her family. You see, much of the Finch's family life was informed by their belief in some sort of curse and that they thought to be the cause of all these untimely deaths. Depending on the perspective each story, the mystical elements are more or less present and they are typically the most present when the story of the death is told from the person who died.
10. After a while, you get the distinct impression that in at least some of the these cases, the curse is not supernatural in nature but perhaps a more mundane but no less deadly hereditary mental illness.
11. In the case of Edith's brother Lewis, it certainly was mental illness and is also the only section narrated by someone who was completely outside of the Finch family. It directly touches on addiction, depression and schizoid withdrawal, all of which are dealt w/ sympathetically and w/ subtlety and respect. It allows you to look at a mentally ill person and an outside observer at the same time, something that would be difficult to achieve outside the medium of games.
12. I would not call this game fun. Indeed, at times it is very much the opposite of that. Several of Edith's now deceased relatives were children when they met their end, for example. This is heavy stuff, folks, but none of it is presented for cheap shock value and it is all woven into the story for specific perspectives and purposes.
13. What Remains of Edith Finch is a narrative game where you are neither provided w/ a skill-based challenge nor given agency in how the story progresses that nevertheless compels you to pay attention to it. It does this w/ engaging presentation, changing it's pace over time, by treating its subject matter and audience w/ respect and using the video game as a medium to make it into something more than an interactive film. In other words, it is very good. Is that pretty pat?
No comments:
Post a Comment