Jun 16, 2017 What happened at this house and What Remains Of Edith Finch? The new PS4/PC game What Remains of Edith Finch tells the tale of a doomed family living in a mansion off the coast of Washington state. It’s a cool story, but what does it all mean?
“It all started with exploring a sense of awe, particularly the kind of awe I’ve experienced in nature,” said Dallas over the phone. “The kernel of that originally was the experience of scuba diving in Washington state, the feeling of looking at the bottom of the ocean sloping away into seemingly infinite darkness. The way things can be simultaneously beautiful, but also overwhelming.”Edith Finch follows the titular character as she returns to her family home to find out the truth about what happened to her relatives. You play as each of her family members, witnessing each of their deaths from a first-person perspective. Each scenario features a kind of magic realism to it — Molly turns into various animals, Lewis escapes into a fantasy land, and Milton simply disappears, leaving behind a series of inky black drawings.Some of the deaths are more concrete, whereas others are left up to the players’ imaginations.
Barbara’s death has turned into an urban legend, obscured through various retellings including an off-color comic book that sketches out a fantastical ending for her using horror movie tropes. Dallas says the genre of “weird fiction” was a large source of inspiration, citing authors like Neil Gaiman, Edgar Allen Poe, and Jorge Luis Borges.“I expect that players will wrestle with their own interpretations of these things,” said Dallas. “What we found is that—another part of weird fiction is that sense of murkiness. Your inability to ever really understand what is going. And not because the truth is being hidden from you. It’s a lot worse. Lovecraft and a lot of other stories, the world is just too complicated or too bizarre for your brain to understand.”Dallas says that some players were upset that the ending didn’t fully resolve all the mysteries of the game.
The family’s curse, for instance, is never actually confirmed to be real. At the end, just as you finally get to revisit the sunken house from the Old World, you literally have the story torn away from you — or maybe, you’re meant to believe that there are no answers to be found. Some of the subtext suggests that imagination and stories were the real culprit behind all the tragic deaths. Dallas says that it’s much more interesting to him to leave the story open-ended and let players digest and process it for themselves.“We’ve gotten a lot of strong positive reactions, people saying the story was one of the most impactful experiences of their whole life,” said Dallas.
“People have called out the ending specifically. They really like the way this wraps up.
And then other people feel upset that things didn’t get resolved.”Dallas says that the main thrust of the game is to provide a space where players can consider the topic of mortality, not to wrap things up neatly with a bow.At first glance, What Remains of Edith Finch might remind people of so-called “walking simulators,” a term that was originally used disparagingly to categorize games where the main mechanic is to walk around and interact with the environment. The term isn’t used as pejoratively anymore, especially since the release of critically acclaimed titles such as Gone Home and, which featured strong stories and characters.Dallas says that Edith Finch isn’t really a walking simulator per se, but there isn’t really a better term for this kind of genre right now. It shares some traits with other titles — after all, you guide Edith Jr. Through her childhood home and inspect the environment — but he says that Giant Sparrow worked to add a lot of different types of interactivity to complement the exploratory aspect.“It was extremely challenging to come up with—I don’t know what the final tally was, but something like 13 different control schemes for the game, each one having to be tuned a bit and evolving over time,” said Dallas. And then the challenge of, in this game, really, combining all of those things into something that feels somewhat cohesive.”Dallas said that they actually created several stories that didn’t make it into the final game.
They culled the vignettes down based on watching people playtest them and seeing the emotional responses. The theme of getting lost in imagination wasn’t even part of the game at the start; that theme actually emerged organically after several prototypes and playtest sessions.“With 13 stories or so, there was a lot of organic, back and forth to the stories. And even more so with Edith herself, trying to figure out what Edith’s perspective on all of this should be,” said Dallas. “Ultimately the question is, as a player, what do you care about? What’s interesting to you?
What can Edith be talking about when you enter a room that feels like it’s speaking to something you’ve already prepared for, and doesn’t feel like just a voice in your ear prattling along about something you’re not really connected to?”He added: “For players, what we found – and so what we created – was this sense of not quite knowing what to believe in any of these stories—a lot of them can go in various ways depending on your interpretation of events. Because that was already there for players, we made that the centerpiece of Edith’s own story.”.
It’s unusual to find a game that is surprising all the way through. Perhaps Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pai n — where you wake to David Bowie and a massive-bosomed nurse, abruptly run naked-butted under heavy gunfire away from whatever-the-hell-it-is outside, and then fall into an escalating 1980s stealth bonanza — is the last time, before What Remains of Edith Finch, that I really felt it.The genre that is now most capable of surprises is the “walking simulator.” Doom could fall under that title if you consider it merely a game about what the character’s legs do. But something weird happens when you remove shooting from a first-person shooter: You have to make the environment interesting without putting someone’s exploding giblets all over it.This story contains spoilers for What Remains of Edith Finch. Polygon a sked some of our favorite game developers and writers to reflect on the games we played in 2017. To see all of the stories,.Edith Finch’s approach is particularly intriguing: Visit a whimsical, eccentric Norwegian family’s home where tunnels, trap doors, handles hidden in books and willy-nilly extensions to the house layer the discoveries on top of one another. The surprises come as a series of vignettes about Edith’s family and their mysterious deaths, which are jealously kept secrets conveniently ferreted away in epistolary form for Edith to discover. The members of the family died at different times doing a number of different odd activities, and these vignettes are little windows of magical realism.
They are also changeups of how the player character and the objects we see respond differently to new controls. Giant Sparrow/Annapurna InteractiveThe house is populated with trinkets, boxes, books, letters, murals, plants, gerbil cages, punching bags, cans of fish, stuffed toys and so much more. It feels cluttered, claustrophobic, close, over-lived-in, a kind of archive of belongings and history. This is also how stacking up the family’s fates makes one feel: smothered by inevitability, trapped by the story, unable to get out of a narrative, constantly circling negative thoughts. I found myself thinking unhappily about how family might brutally condition one’s behaviors or pass on bad habits, and how the story presents the past as completely and utterly defining the future. It felt like being told that there is no exit, no way to not make the same mistakes. The genre most capable of surprises is the “walking simulator”This last idea is expanded upon in the narration that appears written in the world on cabinets, doors and windows, accompanied by Edith’s voice-over.
It leads you through the house to the next part of the story like string tugging on your waist. At one point Edith wonders out loud that if her relatives had never retold these folk tales about a curse on the family, they might have stopped them from coming true.Edith Finch is smothered in words.
She often narrates what is already seen in the environment throughout the game, a practice that I struggle to rid myself of in my own narrative design day jobs. The temptation is tantalizing: to write a line about what is happening before an art asset has been made in the development pipeline, or to fill a silence with a voice-over, or to have a character comment on something in front of them, to help the level design or for the sake of it. Here it is purposeful, telling the player where to go. Edith Finch is smothered in wordsIn games it is so easy to rely on words, and I have started to go to war with them in my own work.
If they’re unnecessary, it takes the sheen off what you see and hear. Silence is better than the kid yelling out the punchline at the movies. Game development is a heavy, unrelenting nightmare, and I am constantly terrified I’ll become that kid.I suppose in this case there is some virtue in being told constantly what is happening by Edith. It is a convincing overture on self-fulfilling prophecies. The narration intimates extinction ahead, and then you are funneled through the varying mechanical processes that the player can be lured into in the vignettes: becoming a cat chasing a bird, taking photographs, eating peaches, flying Katamari kites — always seeming to slide toward death, sometimes obviously, and at other times taking a while before the blindside.
Giant Sparrow/Annapurna InteractiveThe strongest of the vignettes muses on how stories and games can encroach on your time and take up room in your head, and how control and achievement in the imaginary world can become alluring when the real one is boring and unalterable. The left stick controls exploration of a fantasy world, while the right stick controls an arm undertaking a repetitive job in a fish factory.
Eventually the fantasy side of the screen engulfs the fish-factory side of the screen and, yes, your character dies. It’s very strong in contrasting the two distinct mechanical actions required by each world, but I glimpsed a concrete, if perhaps unintended, message: Let what you love kill you.
The narration is convincing overture on self-fulfilling propheciesI have many conflicting feelings about such a maxim. On the one hand, it's catchy and romantic about the act of creation, and I love working hard at a thing I love.
It keeps me happy and busy and around clever people. On the other hand, there have been times when I was so poor and depressed by the environment I worked in that I contemplated ending my own life.Of course, this game is a metaphorical exploration of these ideas.
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But it is good to remember that our love for our work is actually killing creative people right now, because it can be exploited. It is making people crush themselves. Well-known game developers have written about crunching so hard they’ve lost whole years of their memory. Sometimes creative people might stay poor all their lives because what they make is their only income, and companies can make them do it for next to nothing.
We shouldn’t have to be broken by our love. It isn’t an inevitability.
We should push back to make doing what you love healthy. As, “Make art. Help others do the same.”But “death” can stand in for many things.
Perhaps the dominating commonality between Edith Finch’s vignettes is that finding what you love can set you free. It can release you from your family. It is your ticket out of your prison. Giant Sparrow/Annapurna InteractiveFor that reason, Edith Finch’s strong experimentation with the walking simulator doesn’t end with a flawless execution of its theme.
The surprises are confined to the vignettes. The tone of the end indicates that something uplifting, some intimation of freedom, should be taken from the continuance of the Finch family line, but the story doesn’t quite deliver. There is no final reveal or realization, no use of the information gained in discovery to change the main character. The story merely stops, in a way that indicates a kind of biological determinism in people, that your family has doomed you. That you will never get out, so you should just accept that you are fated to be like them.This is a grim thing to indicate, given that some people might never find the thing that frees them. Some people’s lives are just difficult, and sometimes a good part of that is their family’s treatment of them.At school I remember writing in the margin of a poem: “death is hereditary.” My English teacher laughed; perhaps she thought I was dense, or perhaps she was just delighted that I’d written it at all.As I get older, I think to myself: death is hereditary. It’s the only thing that we can count on, that we have inherited the ability to die of old age.
We can only hope that by the time we get there, we’ve learned how not to subject ourselves to bad habits, like doing the same things over and over and expecting a different outcome. Edith Finch made me think deeply about that. I’m lucky I didn’t play Super Meat Boy instead.Cara Ellison is a writer and narrative designer for video games. She is currently working on the Media Molecule game Dreams.
She has made a corner of the utopian internet here:. You can find her on Mastodon, if you really must.
The hero remains recognizable but customisable. To buy and equip the loot or buy upgrades, DNA is necessary, used as a currency. Darkspore mod. There are thousands of parts to collect which enhance the overall gaming experience. See also:The Hero editor in Darkspore has been described as an enhanced version of. The different types of parts include enabling the customization of several character aspects, including body parts, armor, weapons, facial features and coloration.