What Remains of Edith Finch

What Remains of Edith Finch from Giant Sparrow is a short but remarkably inventive adventure in which young Edith returns to her family's house on the coast to go through the history of her cursed family and find out how each of her relatives died. The game is structured as a collection of small vignettes, with each family member's story told through a completely different gameplay mechanic, one moment a surreal walk through childhood fantasy, another a tense sequence in a canning factory, elsewhere an abstract vision of approaching death, making every chapter a unique experience.

On Xbox One the game ran flawlessly, as it's fairly undemanding on hardware, focusing above all on atmosphere and storytelling rather than action challenges. The visual style combines a realistically rendered yet oddly extended family house full of improvised additions with poetic, dreamlike sequences for each individual memory, and the music sensitively underscores a melancholic, though never outright frightening, mood. Contemporary reception was extraordinarily positive, with the game collecting awards for storytelling and innovative design, and it's often cited as one of the finest examples of how gameplay mechanics can be used to tell an emotional story. Even years after release it remains a benchmark title of the walking-sim adventure genre and a demonstration of how powerfully a game can function as a literary medium.

The Finch family house itself functions as a narrator, with the bricked-up rooms of deceased relatives turned into small memorial shrines, through which Edith symbolically walks back into the present after experiencing each memory. Every vignette adopts a form suited to that character's nature and fate, so the player is never bored by repeating the same mechanic, and the transitions between the different styles are smooth and unforced. The short playtime is paradoxically one of the game's greatest strengths, as it never lets any idea grow stale, keeping the whole experience dense and emotionally focused from beginning to its moving conclusion.

Why play it: Anyone who appreciates a short but dense narrative experience will find in What Remains of Edith Finch a house that functions as a narrator and vignettes that change form to match the fate of each member of the Finch family.