Presence in the Past | WHAT REMAINS OF EDITH FINCH
“I think the best we can do is try to open our eyes, and appreciate how strange and brief all of this is”
Whenever I am asked why I believe video games are an artform, I point to this game. There is nothing crueler than dangling over the precipice of death, and What Remains of Edith Finch manages to transform that fear into an appreciation for life. To do so means to make something of the existentialism, to pull a flower from a carcass and feel at ease knowing that nothing ever truly ends. I have always feared death, one of the only things in life I cannot escape from, try as I might. But what makes this game a true work of art is in the way it makes you feel and for me, that feeling was a little bit closer to acceptance.
Spoiler Warning
Before we continue, it’s difficult to discuss the essence of this game without spoiling the entire story, therefore I implore you to play it yourself first if you are able. It’s a short one, only about 2.5 hours, and to experience such a story is well worth the effort.
We begin the story looking out the back of a ferry. Immediately we understand that this game is going to be visually breathtaking. The soft colour palette gives off a calm mimicked by the sea you travel across. You would think the calm is short-lived given the tragic context of the story, but we revisited that feeling repeatedly throughout the game despite the chaos of each family member's life and death. There’s something so powerful about contrasting the present with the past, the acceptance with the grief, the sunlight with the storm. I guess it also gives us some respite through the heartbreak.
We look down and discover our arm in a cast, a bunch of lilies and a diary on our lap. This is the diary of Edith Finch. It is her voice and her character we follow through the woods towards a rickety old towering house on the cliffside. Edith’s voice actor (Valerie Rose Lohman) does a wonderful job at encapsulating the poetic and melancholy ‘written’ diary of this young girl, as she revisits the home that brings her so much joy and so much pain. Despite being the last living member of the Finch family, the house she inherits is not simply a shell. Within its walls it holds the memory of every other Finch that came before, along with the curse that brought about their strange and early deaths. With each loss, the family became more and more broken, and while Edith never knew the majority of them, the burdens of the family curse passed down to her until she too felt its weight.
Screenshot by CoolaTheMagicOtter via steamcommunity.com
Aside from the tragedy, what made the story so intriguing was the characterisation of these family members through exploration of the house, especially their bedrooms, how they do not even need to be present to understand who they were as people. The rooms are cluttered with detail; strewn newspaper clippings, piles of well-read books, keepsakes, drawings, photos, posters … you can feel their presence all around you. If not for the shrines around their carefully painted portraits signed with the date of their demise, there is no other inclination that they are no longer amongst the living. It goes to show we really are just products of the world around us, or is it the other way around?
By returning to the abandoned family home and stepping through the sealed doors, Edith did what the rest of her family failed to do. I think she knew her story was coming to its conclusion, so she chose to unlock a new path using the key her mother (Dawn) gave her. I like to believe that Dawn regretted not taking that path herself, but as mother’s do, they want more for their children. And so Edith, as an expectant mother herself, heals her wounds instead of ignoring them, ending the cycle of generational trauma.
I had watched a full playthrough a while ago, so I knew what was coming. I will never truly know the feeling of diving into this game for the first time myself, but knowing what to expect never took away from the overall experience. The game masterfully leads you through the lives of these characters as if you know them personally, and the loss felt by the surviving family is still there, and still potent. Like Edith, a lot of us may similarly have loved ones that live on only through stories and trinkets left behind. It’s easy to forget that the names sitting on the branches of family trees were very real people, with their own loves and hates and visceral memories. We see snapshots of our relatives and think we understand them, when in reality we never will. But to have an opportunity to see through their eyes? What a gift that would be.
Screenshot by gallusmathematicus via steamcommunity.com
What Remains of Edith Finch allows us to explore this possibility through one of my favourite sub genres; magical realism. This method of lavish storytelling is ripe with creativity. To muster the exact emotions while venturing outside the realm of reality leaves much to the imagination of the audience, and requires a skill I could only dream of mastering. Little Molly didn’t really turn into a cat, Barbara wasn’t really eaten by horror film characters, Lewis wasn’t really crowned king of his subjects. But regardless of whether we believe it or not, we are left with something that lingers long after the credits roll.
As the words from Edith’s diary come to a close, it is revealed that she has already passed on, and it is her son visiting her grave in the family cemetery. The lilies were for her. He will grow up knowing the family history, no secrets, nothing festering. Before he closes the journal for the last time, Edith says,
“I want you to be amazed that any of us ever had the chance to be here at all.”
It might take me a while to gather the courage that Edith had. There will come a day when I too will be one of them. An empty space at the dinner table. A name at the end of a tree branch. Accepting the end might come easier the older we get, because it certainly isn’t easy at present. But perhaps, even if our time comes when we least expect it, even if we leave many things unfinished, we will live on through what remains of us.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a brief and bittersweet indie game developed by Giant Sparrow, and published by Annapurna Interactive, known for their games Stray, Journey and Outer Wilds, among many others. Play it on Steam here.
