#game Review -What Remains of Edith Finch: A Strange Synesthetic Journey of Death
What Remains of Edith Finch**, developed by the independent American studio Giant Sparrow and winner of the 2017 The Game Awards for Best Narrative, tells the story of a family curse, creating an experience where magic and reality intertwine. As a player, I explored the labyrinthine Finch family home through the first-person perspective of the protagonist, Edith Finch, immersing myself in the memories of each family member’s final moments. Although the game centers on death, it never feels oppressive; instead, its immersive storytelling fuels my curiosity and reflection. After experiencing all the narratives, Edith herself reaches the “fate” of death, and her son becomes the last living Finch in the world. Is the story conveying the Borges-like theme of “life as an infinite loop without truth,” or is it inspiring players to rethink their own relationship with death? Both interpretations point to a shared truth: regardless of the curse’s origin, the experience of life itself is what matters most. As the game’s creator and writer Ian Dallas once said, “I hope players will have a renewed appreciation for how short and amazing our lives are.”
The profound impact of What Remains of Edith Finch as a meditation on death stems from the depth of its game design. First, Ian Dallas crafted a “collage-style” narrative delivered through diaries and other paper media, rhythmically linking the stories of each family member on the sprawling Finch family tree. While the curse connects them, each story stands independently. Dallas chose different physical artifacts—postcards, letters, scrapbooks—to serve as portals into each character’s death story, while richly detailed room environments deepen player immersion. This not only helps players map out the story on a macro level but also allows the pacing of gameplay to be finely tuned.
Second, the game offers imaginative and varied interactions that let players experience the cursed yet vibrant family home as a real, tangible space. For example, a hidden key is cleverly disguised as the knob of a music box discovered during exploration, only revealed after triggering certain story events. Text isn’t just for reading plot—it also guides players through levels. In the story of Gus, who died flying a kite, words transform into symbols trailing the kite, creating a striking visual spectacle. In this way, the traditional literary act of “reading” is creatively reimagined as an interactive experience, leaving an unforgettable impression.
Finally, the game innovates by blending gameplay with other media in almost surreal ways. Barbara’s terrifying Halloween night unfolds like a movie within comic panels, bursting with vivid, grotesque colors that sharply contrast the muted tones of earlier chapters. It feels like a dream within a dream, blurring what’s real and imagined within the grid of comic cells. Under the nested structure and stable first-person perspective, literature, comics, cinema, and games merge seamlessly. For instance, the camera angles when Sam is pushed off a cliff by a moose, or flipping through Milton’s hand-drawn scrapbook, fuse the artistic qualities of different media to create a strange, multifaceted experience.
From a level design perspective, Edith Finch follows the principle of “easy to hard” while carefully managing the player’s psychological pacing. More importantly, the developers didn’t limit themselves to a single gameplay style dictated by the story; instead, they pushed gameplay to its fullest within each narrative context, deeply integrating storytelling and experience. In Molly’s story, the first family member, she hallucinates due to poisoning and transforms into a cat, owl, shark, and sea monster, letting players experience various Lovecraftian-style illusions—jumping between branches, flying, crawling on decks to hunt. These mechanics don’t reappear later, teasing players’ appetites. After a lighter segment watching film reels in Edie’s room, the third chapter lets players swing on Calvin’s giant swing, gradually building to a peak experience. The difficulty ebbs and flows like breathing, culminating in two high points: one is the seventh chapter where players embody a baby drowning in a bathtub surrounded by playful rubber ducks and squirting whales. The increasing challenge encourages repeated attempts, cleverly matching the level’s design. The other is the final chapter, where players simultaneously chop salmon heads on a factory line and explore Levi’s fantasy kingdom seeking the throne. This scene demands multitasking gameplay and bombards players with dazzling, surreal imagery, creating a complex, overwhelming emotional impact. I felt like I was the one lost in this vivid mental world, while the dull reality of the factory line was something I desperately wanted to escape—only to die beneath the guillotine moments before coronation. This segment not only delivers a synesthetic design masterpiece but also echoes existential philosophy and critiques social alienation and class disparity, offering deeper intellectual space than many films or novels.
To me, narrative depth is inseparable from the quality of experience, and a player’s psychological stance is shaped by experience design. In literature and visual arts, this stance tends to be singular—a relationship of watching and being watched, reading and being read. In games, psychological stance is more diverse: through narrative perspective, gameplay mechanics, and player agency, games create richer, multi-dimensional connections between player and content, deepening immersion and enabling more powerful storytelling.
Camus famously wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus that “death is the only serious philosophical problem.” What Remains of Edith Finch shares much with Latin American literary styles, such as Borges’ The Aleph and Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The former tells of an old man searching for inspiration in his basement; the latter slowly unveils seven generations of the Buendía family in Macondo. Yet Edith Finch focuses more on how ordinary, fleeting lives connect and continue one another, unfolding like a theatrical spectacle of life’s wonders. This is what left an indelible impression on me: it is not only a masterpiece in gaming history but also a profound spiritual nourishment that addresses life’s essential questions.
