“If we lived forever, maybe we’d have time to understand things. But as it is, I think the best we can do is try to open our eyes and appreciate how strange and brief all of this is.” – Edith Finch
Warning: This article spoils the heck out of this game. Want some spoiler-free coverage? Check out our review here.
The term “walking simulator” is divisive for many videogame lovers. Even the name came about as much as a term of disparagement as a descriptive genre label. Knowing that a game’s interactivity doesn’t go much farther than literally walking in a character’s shoes doesn’t exactly signal ‘fun’ for many players. And yet the genre name has come to encompass some of the most widely acclaimed narrative-driven games of the past decade, from Gone Home to Firewatch. Most modern AAA games also offer the simplicity of walking and roleplaying as a specific character, but they layer a range of gameplay mechanics and systems on top of this to accommodate whatever more “game-y” genre they are rooting themselves in.
Perhaps, then, what really defines the walking simulator as a categorical label is that its games refuse to complicate (and potentially detract from) their visions of simple and pure interactive storytelling with traditional game elements. Depending on the artistic talent and focus behind these games, this conscious distillation of what we understand a game is can either make for a unique and impactful interactive experience or excessively boring gameplay.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a peak example of the former. It revolves around exploring a massive, surreally layered house that contains the bedrooms of several characters in a long line of deceased family members. Each bedroom we enter has been preserved as a sort of memorial of these tragic figures by the family matriarch, Edie. It invites us to experience the deaths of each family member, represented with a haunting permanence that subverts the normalized immortality of player characters. With this morbid twist, Edith Finch manages to carve a unique identity for itself as perhaps the most profound example I’ve seen of a game attempting to tackle the finality of death.
Who Remains?
The opening scene of Edith Finch places us in the shoes of the only living character in the narrative’s present moment, Christopher Finch. Christopher is on his way to visit the grave of his mother, the titular Edith Finch. As Christopher, we can observe the scenery around us until we look down at his lap and see Edith’s journal resting there. Christopher opens it, begins to read, and the game proper begins.
Edith Finch is structured as a series of fragmented stories told within a frame narrative within Christopher’s larger frame narrative. This first frame narrative makes up the bulk of the game. Here, we play as Edith, who’s returned to her family home after being away for years to learn more about the family history that her recently deceased mother, Edie, attempted to shelter her from.
Through Edith’s narration, we come to learn that the Finch family appears to be afflicted with a curse that causes all but one child of every generation to die—allowing the family line to continue but marring it with tragedy. While exploring the presently uninhabited yet memorially cluttered Finch house as Edith, we discover documents pertaining to the deaths of the other Finches that transport us to interactive segments. In these vignettes dedicated to each dead Finch, we play through creatively presented moments leading up to their untimely ends.
Our progress as Edith is always informed by the text from her journal, which physically manifests in the game’s environment as we move through it and is accompanied by Edith’s narration. This gameplay premise extends to the vignettes of the other Finches as well. They all feature materialized narration from whoever wrote the discovered document, which may or may not have been the deceased Finch the segment centers on. The manifested text serves the dual function of drawing the player’s eye towards important spaces and objects while contextualizing the gameplay as an interactive recreation of the document’s content. Writing always exists as a trace of the past when it was written, and Edith Finch mobilizes this philosophy for the entirety of the game.
Aside from Christopher’s brief opening scene, everything we play through has already happened in the game’s fixed history or has at least presumably happened according to the many written documents we discover as Edith. The 10-year-old Molly’s vignette, for example, comes from her own journal where she describes her intense hunger after being sent to bed without dinner. She proceeds to eat inedible objects around her room (such as fluoridated toothpaste and some likely fatal berries) while imagining (or hallucinating) fantastical experiences hunting prey as a cat, an owl, a shark, and a monster. This even provides a nice excuse for minimalist action sequences to appease our gamer brains’ inclination for killing. The mix of fantasy and realism in Molly’s story informs much of the rest of the game’s tone, as it communicates some of the characters’ fates clearly while shrouding others in more ambiguity.
The other interactive deaths are no less haunting. One has us gaining momentum on a swing as a young boy until he goes too far. Another tells the story of a teenage girl’s pursuit of stardom and mysterious death in a 1950s-styled horror comic with playable segments. In one we simply walk out of the hermit-like bunker where an older Finch had been living in paranoia of his family’s curse, only to be immediately hit by a train. Although the stories behind these deaths could be enough to send a ghostly shiver down the spine, the slight interactive element really makes their impact stick. Time and again, we as the player lead these characters to their end. This isn’t meant as a cheap trick to incite guilt. It’s an elegant way to make the player repeatedly feel the weight of life and grieve as it departs.
Between these segments, we piece together the overarching family narrative as we intimately move through the memorialized rooms of each individual Finch. The ambiguities establish an important commentary on the limited factuality of historical documents while also recognizing that searching for objective historical facts is not necessarily more important than engaging with the personal, human subtexts that underlie such writing.
Death Loop
The core gameplay loop therefore consists of exploring the house to find a new Finch’s room, extracting details about their personality and interests by observing the objects in their room, and learning about their deaths through the interactive vignettes. The controls are simple, as to be expected, but cleverly effective. With a gamepad, you use the analog sticks and shoulder buttons to replicate the motions of Edith’s hands as she handles an object. The loop naturally involves us in Edith’s task of piecing together her family history. By slowly moving through every room and allowing Edith’s writing to color our experience with her view of the different objects we focus on, the setting begins to resonate more intimately as our connection with Edith deepens.
Playing through the final moments of each Finch, meanwhile, requires us to simply accept the inevitable reality of their particular demise, just as Edith surely must have as she wrote about them in her journal. This aspect of the gameplay is steeped in the fatalistic experience of death. Crucially, these deaths do not function like traditional videogame deaths. They play out a linear, unrepeatable scenario. With a poetic irony that stands against videogames’ idealization of nonlinear gameplay structures and functionally immortal avatars, we cannot ‘fail’ to lead any of the Finches to their death. They are part of a history that cannot be reset but must instead be reconciled with. Edith Finch’s gameplay loop of understanding a life (as an observer) and experiencing a death (in first person) makes grief a central, repeated feeling.
By swapping between player characters that are already deceased, Edith Finch finds an effective means of depicting human transience in a medium whose stories and characters are usually preserved by the logic of immortality. Edith Finch manages to encourage reflection on this through its narrative design. The moment when the game makes this metacommentary most explicit is with the penultimate story of Lewis Finch, Edith’s oldest brother. Lewis’ room is near the top of the house. Many gamers might feel especially at home here. It has darkly cozy RGB lighting, a Murphy bed to save space, weed paraphernalia, and good ol’ computers and games. Reading a letter from Lewis’ therapist on the desk triggers his story.
The Story of Lewis Finch
While observing Lewis’ room, it becomes apparent that two of his greatest interests were videogames and drugs, both of which he abused as a means to escape from his undesirable, unheroic reality. Lewis’ vignette begins with you working a shift at a fishing cannery. With the right analogue stick (functioning as Lewis’ right hand), you must grab every fish corpse that falls in front of you, position it under the nearby guillotine to have its head decapitated, and throw the remainder back on a conveyor belt.
This cycle sums up Lewis’ monotonous shift work. At the same time that the player engages in this repetitive task, the therapist’s narration tells us that Lewis had begun deriving true value in his life through imagining a different existence for himself. Immediately, a bubble manifests on the screen, within which we take control of a generic videogame avatar with the left analogue stick, who we proceed to guide through fantastical kingdoms as we receive praise for our apparent heroic deeds from faceless and speechless NPCs.
The tension between Lewis’ imagination and reality is cleverly reflected in the segment’s control scheme, as movement with the left stick controls Lewis the Hero (represented in third person) while the right stick is relegated to Lewis the Cannery Worker (represented in first person). Furthermore, Lewis’ increasing investment in his imaginative exploits becomes manifest in the increasing size of the bubble. Slowly, it begins to overtake the visibility of the cannery work until it fills up the entire screen. It is also notable that only in Lewis’ imaginative bubble is the player ever given any sense of agency in the game because it provides choices such as whether we want to serve a “beautiful prince” or “handsome queen” for Lewis’ fictional quest.
The ultimate triviality of these decisions emphasizes the deceptive sense of empowerment and individuality that videogame agency can convince us of. After all, no matter what choices we make in this segment, we must still end it by leading Lewis to his imminent suicide. By presenting Lewis’ estrangement from his own reality as an overpowering immersion in a generic videogame, the vignette critiques the dangerous allure of the medium’s rhetoric surrounding immortality and incorporeal existence. “My imagination is as real as my body,” Lewis’ therapist reports him having said. It’s an idealistic thought that sounds like a psychological antidote to the alienating effects of monotonous and unrewarding work, but it is also a delusion that rejects the fundamental truth of human mortality. An imagination cannot exist without a body.
What Remains?
Through players enact only the single, unchangeable demise of all its characters, the gameplay of Edith Finch serves as a constant reminder of the fleeting nature of life, the fixed yet elusive truths of history, and the often incomprehensible “curse” of spontaneous death. The game’s engagement with the importance of discovering one’s genealogy—together with its disregard of player agency in favor of telling the fixed stories of its deceased characters—expanded videogames’ palette for reflecting real human experience. This authentic resonance of the gameplay is indebted to the simplicity of the walking simulator: its subdued action and reflective pacing.
I wonder if videogame storytelling would benefit if we regarded “walking simulator” as less of an insular, divisive genre and more as an approach to narrative design that adds flavor to the generic gameplay structures we see time and again. This is coming from someone who appreciates self-designated walking sims but sometimes has a difficult time getting into them. My hope is that more narratively ambitious videogames continue to fluidly incorporate their storytelling innovations. Outer Wilds and Return from the Obra Dinn come to mind as titles that have built more robust gameplay atop the aesthetic foundation of walking sims. Developers of all sorts learning from this ‘genre’ could lead to a greater balance between dynamic, varied narrative design and engaging mechanics.
