Jared’s Top Ten Games of This Horrible, Godforsaken Year

9. What Remains of Edith Finch

This is the pseudo-sequel to Gone Home that The Fullbright Company should have released, not Tacoma. Tacoma was incredibly short, and while extremely interesting it was too short, fizzled out by the end, and had ultimately not a lot to say. The finale ramped up into nothing, it was a super happy ending that resolved everything in a neat bow, and for the amount of work and time that goes into these ‘walking simulators’ or ‘stroll playing games’ you’d think these stories would be longer and punchier and weightier. It’s wonderful to see indie’s best and brightest tackling interesting ideas, making risks with their pacing and mechanics to tell their stories, exploring themes new to games, and are expanding the scope and breath of what characters we see in games. But besides the diversity and subject matter, it’s rare to see these narratives go for the jugular like movies do; it’s one thing to make someone cry because of Clementine’s actions in The Walking Dead, it’s another to give us something like the ending of The Seventh Seal, or the girl in the red dress from Schindler’s List, or the suicide scene from The Royal Tenebaums, or the ending 30 minutes of Nashville, or the final scenes in Shame. It’s a horrible standard to set, but the closer we get to those examples, and the more we incorporate gameplay with emotional storytelling, the better off we will be.

So that is where I transition into What Remains of Edith Finch, a giant step up narratively from Giant Sparrow’s previous entry The Unfinished Swan (which I love) and a major step down mechanically. The Unfinished Swan is a terrific series of inventive and beautiful puzzles split into chapters with a story weaved around it, and Edith Finch is a sprawling and lovely sad tale with some ingenious playable moments attached to little side stories, with a lot of slow walking in-between. There was points where I asked myself if this should be a game; the camera and controls get taken from you so often it feels like it’s on rails, in terms of where you could look (you have to stare at the words written in the world that you hear narrated over you constantly). But for it’s very short length, it trims the fat and gets right to its best moments, which is what I’m looking for. It hit me like a truck, and made me laugh quite a few times, and almost tear up more times, and when you say out loud “no way” and “get out” and “I can’t believe they did that”, you know you’re on the right track.

Edith Finch is a game about a cursed family of lovable losers, who struggle with the kinds of problems that people who play indie games probably also deal with. The characters get far too brief mini-games that explain how they died, and you control different elements of the surreal world, embodying nature or animals or concepts or dreams as you learn about how each generation of Finch handles the burden of the previous, and fails to change their outcome. And the most haunting moments for me are the final set-pieces, dealing with mental illness and suicide, so of course I felt the most attached to those segments. But Edith Finch only gets better and better as it goes along, and ramps up into some of the best mini-levels I’ve seen in an indie in years. If you google any list or video of the best levels from 2017, you are likely to find agreement on the tale of Lewis Finch:

Games are at their best when they intertwine gameplay and story in such a way that it is impossible to separate, and impossible to adapt to other mediums, and is best experienced by yourself and not in a video or Twitch stream. Papers Please, Brothers, and Edith Finch are examples of this, and it’s inspiring to see them continue to push the boundaries.

Is this the Dark Souls of walking simulators?