Update One Hundred and Eleven: 16 January 2017

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

When I first opened the door into the Finch house, I stepped back in time.

I think I was eight, or nine. I had a friend who lived up the street from me and around the corner, and another friend who lived across the street from her. The three of us were inseperable for about three years, until we all abruptly stopped being friends (we grew into very different pre-teens). The first girl - Britney - lived with her parents, younger sister, and grandparents in that house, which belonged to her grandparents. It was always a little dark, but not scary. The air there was very still and contemplative. The place was crammed with stuff - most of it very old.

I would beg Britney to let us go up to the third floor of the house, into a very squished storage room with a slanted roof. Amidst the boxes, set perpendicular to the highest window in the house, was an old upright piano, and across from that was a cabinet filled with very old porcelin figures, filegreed boxes, and curios from her grandmother’s childhood. The sun would be yellow through the very old, very fine curtains, and they would shine on the keys. It was quiet there in a way most of my life was not. I hold that memory very dear to me, and through What Remains of Edith Finch I got to visit that memory once again.

Let me be blunt: this game is fucking fantastic.

I love walking simulators, and this is a wonderful evolution of the genre. The use of changing perspective and changing playstyle breaks up the flow of walking around and exploring in a way that adds vitality to an admittedly slow, methodical genre. This game is a feat of level design to an extent I don’t think I’ve ever encountered before. It’s more lived in than the house in Gone Home, its more varied in place and time and more focused and directed, all at once. I, unfortunately, had to play on potato settings to have it run well, and this is something I want to play again on a better computer so I can bask in this detail - so it can match up with the fidelity of my memories. Even on the lowest of low settings I got something out of it - something about how the paintings’ textures were very blurry made it more real to me. Of course they’d be blurry - I don’t know them, I don’t remember them, they’re the haze of memory.

The voice acting is superb, the writing is clever (but never twee) and interesting (but never pretentious), which is like mana from heaven for me. I want to live in old libraries, and sleep and root around in historical rooms preserved as museum exhibits - and I got to do both here. I love ensamble pieces, and short stories, and vignettes, and interconnected short stories and vignettes, and a very tight intricate connected story. This game was made for me and my god do I appreciate it.

Were there things I didn’t like so much? Sure! Sometimes the controls were a little dodgy, and for how much the game pushes the envelope, the ending is absolutely conventional and a little bit of a letdown - but that’s one minute out of nearly three hours.

I know I can’t recommend my taste for everyone, but if you want to see what an interactive medium can do, you should play this game. Take a walk through your memories, too.

Next up: After looking up and watching every analytical Edith Finch video I can find, I’ll be playing -

See you soon!