Thoughts Concerning Edith Finch: Death By Fantasy

For those wondering who or what I'm talking about What Remains of Edith Finch is an interactive story and walking simulator experience. The story revolves around the titular character's testimony regarding the Finch Family Curse, and all those who suffered because of it. As well as how they suffered, too.

The stories Edith retells all concern the final moments of all the Finch family members who perished in strange and unusual ways. And, to put a cherry on top of all this fictional misery, the game makes the player complicit in all these people's demise.

It's a game about death, generational trauma, and several people being extremely colourblind regarding all the red flags flapping all over the place. It's a game about the dangers of holding on to misery, as well as the peril of over-memorialisation.

Spoilers ahead, so go buy and play it if you don't want those. You back? Excellent.

Even though you play a majority of the story as Edith Finch, it's not being experienced by Edith Finch. It's all being experienced by her son, who's reading her story. And it's being experienced by us as we wander through the environment. Our/Edith's actions cause the text of her story to be influenced as if they're physically there. Which I think is a neat feature.

In fact, interactive text influence remains a feature of all the stories in the story of/by Edith Finch.

We can wander around and discover other thoughts before attempting to enter the house. Edith's childhood home and a monument to health and safety violations. The whole thing looks like it could collapse under a stiff breeze. This is our first hint that there is something drastically wrong with the house and all those who chose to remain there.

The second hint is in the narrative, and how concentrated the house and its owner was. When you get beyond the garage, the inside of the house is littered with books. I took the time to examine them all and they're not all individual titles. There's multiple copies of several books. Including (from memory) Labyrinths, Aegis, and Death and the Beyond. There's hundreds of books all over the house.

The Doylist explanation for that is that the gamemakers could only create so many assets for the environment, and who reads all the spines in all the books in an environment of a storytelling game? [I mean, besides this nerd.] The Watsonian possibility is that the whole family suffered from Clutter Duplication. Can't find the thing? Buy a new one and put it down. Lather, rinse, and repeat ad infinitum. Or until someone comes along and helps people unriddle all the mess.

Then we learn that each residents' bedroom has become their memorial shrine. Including the house's bathroom, which makes me wonder what the hell the family was doing for hygiene after the passive-aggressive renovations covered in the narrative.

Edith's mother - Dawn - had had enough of Great-Grandma Edie's nonsense and sealed up all the rooms that Edith wasn't allowed into. Followed shortly by Edie installing peepholes.

Yeah. This family is extra in very bizarre directions.

They could have repurposed the rooms no longer used by the dead, but no. They stayed exactly as they were when the inhabitant perished. To the point where Grampa Sam spent seven years sharing his room with the memory of his dead twin.

That's fucked up.

It has to do something to people's heads.

When you get to Edie's room, you discover that insanity runs in the family. It all but gallops. Starting with Edie's father shipping his house all the frik way across the Atlantic motherloving Ocean.

Like I said. They're extra.

That particular lunatic sank with his house and prompted the family to build the family graveyard before they finished working on the house. That was where the memorialisation obsession started. And possibly the dawn of Edie's obsession with fame. And possibly the start of her varied Munchausen's Syndromes plus possibly schitzophrenia.

I've seen a video on that topic, and though I do admit they have a point, I'd have to get a shrink to diagnose the family.

I can definitely see Edie having both versions of Munchausen's. By proxy in how she neglected her kids to death, and in person by how she fabricated a lot of stories that were tangentially related to the truth.

The Finch family could have turned their association with fantasy into an amazing legacy of fiction production, but no. They bought into the concept of the family curse and put all their energies into really really bafflingly daft choices.

Such as adding more structure to the house rather than emptying unoccupied rooms out for the living. This is the memorialisation at work again, causing a huge dysfunction that resulted in the tower of illogical stability, in which the last generation resided. The further you go, the more you wonder how anyone here thought they were making the logical choice.

Or how they could possibly accept those living arrangements every time a storm picked up.

Clinging to the memories, clinging to the stories, might have helped with each demise following Sam's generation. As the deaths mounted and the misery collected, Edie might have encouraged the clinging and the memorialisation, since that was all she had to cope.

They could really have done with a shrink or three. Or fifteen.

In the game, each space has a story. Each space has a playable vignette where you, the player, use various actions to enact the character's last moments. We help each and every Finch who passed to pass. All so we can experience the story.

We're encouraged to experience them all. To investigate every nook and cranny of the dilapidated old wreck as Edith. We can see the ruin that the house and, by implication, fell into. And in those ruins, memories of death and destruction.

And when you play through it, you discover that Edie's son has returned to the house. With the choice to live with the curse or ignore it. The cast on his arm at the beginning worries me, but there is hope.

In the last frames of the game, we see that the house has been fixed up and restored. Maybe it's a tourist stop. Maybe the kid doesn't live here. But... all the same...

Edith was buried there, with the rest of her family.