What Remains of Edith Finch

What Remains of Edith Finch is a narrative adventure from Giant Sparrow in which a young woman returns to an abandoned family house on the northwestern coast of the United States and tries to understand why she's the only one left of a sprawling family. The house itself is the main character, a bizarre structure that generations of Finches extended upward and outward until it became a tower full of rooms sealed off after their occupants' deaths. The player gradually works through them via secret passageways, and in each one finds an object that triggers a memory of that family member's last day alive.

The game's strength lies in the fact that no two memories play the same way. In one you turn into a bird of prey hunting through treetops, in another you follow comic-book panels, elsewhere you balance on a swing, and the most famous sequence has you simultaneously gutting fish in a factory and dreaming of a fairy-tale kingdom, controlling both activities at once. Each segment lasts only a few minutes, has its own visual style and control scheme, and ends at precisely the moment the mechanic might start to wear thin. The full playthrough takes roughly two hours, and the game contains no failure states or combat of any kind.

On PlayStation 4 the game looks excellent above all thanks to its use of light and its immensely detailed, lived-in rooms, which tell more about their owners than any dialogue could. Text appears directly in space, floats in the air, and vanishes as you move forward, tying reading directly to movement. The music is intimate and lets the narrator's voice and the sounds of the old house come through. Critics received the game with enthusiasm, and the title won numerous awards for its storytelling. To this day it's cited as one of the most convincing proofs that games can handle the theme of death and family memory in a way no other medium can manage. Credit for that goes partly to the fact that the game never slides into cheap sentimentality and instead presents each fate with a strange, slightly bizarre tenderness. The title's influence can be seen across an entire wave of short narrative games that followed, adopting its idea of a set of standalone, mechanically distinct episodes within one framing story.