What Remains of Edith Finch Review — A Family of Many Tragedies

When it comes to short indie walking simulators, What Remains of Edith Finch is easily one of the most popular. It’s been played in plenty of YouTube channels and discussed in many analysis videos. So, me going back a few years and remembering my first impressions makes me feel a little bit of pressure.

This is the story of the Finch family, and the tragedy behind each member’s passing or disappearance throughout the years. We learn about their history from Edith’s perspective, who, as an adult, returns to the house where everyone lived at one point or another.

As we approach the house, we can already see from a distance that it’s not a conventional building. There are rooms built on top of other rooms on top of the main house. It’s a vertical monster of realty construction; one reminiscent of weirdly shaped favelas.

Edith explains that, after a specific incident, her mother sealed up all the bedrooms. Because of this, as the player, we still get to enter each room, but in a very specific order and in very interesting ways. Every time we enter a new room or area of the house, we learn about the family member that used to inhabit it.

Each section, you could say, presents its own little story and usually has some gameplay elements that differentiate it from the rest. 10-year-old Molly “turns into a cat” and exits through the window to catch a bird, and we get to witness her adventure as she keeps transforming into different animals. This is the first of many mini-sections dedicated to getting in the shoes of various of Edith’s relatives.

Like me, you’ll probably find some characters more relatable than others due to the variety in personalities. I’ll mention a couple more, but I really think you should discover the story of each of them on your own.

Grandpa Sam loved nature and we learn about that time he took his daughter Dawn camping, who we play as while she’s in charge of the camera. Barbara used to be a famous child actor, known for her scream of horror, and her story is told to us quite originally, as if we were reading a horror comic book. Like these, there are many other characters we’ll get familiar with, each one carefully presented in a way that depicts everyone’s uniqueness.

But, as interesting as each piece of the story is, it is also really sad when you realize this family has suffered too many tragedies. Not only did this cause so much pain and trauma for the ones left behind each time, but it also created a bigger sense that they might be cursed, and may end up meeting a similar fate, with their life being cut short under any kind of unexpected circumstances. That’s just no way to live.

What’s more is that, despite some bedrooms becoming vacant due to the deaths or disappearances, the family still insisted on building extra rooms when new family members required their own space. It seems they put too much value on keeping the old rooms intact, respecting the memory of the people who used to live there. While the game never goes there, the fact that many died abruptly inside or around the house, could also imply that their ghosts still linger there. In that case, perhaps keeping their rooms as they were at the time and off-limits to everyone else may not be a bad idea, with the rooms themselves becoming, in a way, ghosts of their own to those still living in the house.

With the house being pretty much its own character, you gotta find it both fascinating and incredibly impractical. All those newer bedrooms built on top of the main building are difficult to reach, let alone how bothersome it must have been at times to grab an umbrella or an extra coat just to take a shower or have a meal with the rest of the family. Whoever was behind the brilliant idea of having no choice but to go out in the open multiple times per day in your own property was, in my opinion, a jokester, a terrible designer, and most definitely, someone who didn’t stay in one of those upper location rooms.

But I will forever be a fan of the secret passages. Every time there’s a “pull this” or “push that” moment to open up a hidden area, it makes my inner child scream with excitement. Resident Evil’s architect George Trevor would probably be so proud, too.

I used to dream of building my own house with secret rooms behind unsuspecting library shelves. Getting inside and crawling through these parts of the Finch house made me feel like I was playfully hiding from my family, even if I was the only one there.

By the end of the game, you realize that, there actually aren’t many of your usual story progression elements such as character development or conflict resolution, but rather, it’s an experience where you learn the history of a family, and how each member had their own inner world. It all leads to the one conclusion we already know and still tend to forget.

Life is a miracle, and we never know how long ours is going to be, so we might as well try to enjoy it as best we can while we’re still here.

What Remains of Edith Finch reminds you of just that, while introducing you to a most curious family and set of characters that are wonderfully enjoyable, and I wouldn’t want you to miss out on that.