What Remains of Edith Finch is a video game where players explore the story from the perspective of the main character. It was created by Giant Sparrow and published by Annapurna Interactive. The game was released in 2017 for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One. It came out for Nintendo Switch in 2019, iOS in 2021, and PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2022.
The story follows Edith Finch, the last living member of her family, as she returns to her family home after seven years. As she explores the house, she learns about her family's past and the events that led to their family breaking apart. The game is a collection of connected stories. Each story is told from different viewpoints and uses different types of media. Players are encouraged to question whether these stories are true. The game uses a style that mixes reality with fantasy elements and explores ideas like free will, fate, memory, and death.
What Remains of Edith Finch was highly praised for its storytelling, characters, and visuals. It is seen as an example of video games as an art form. It won the British Academy Games Award for Best Game in 2017 and the Best Narrative award at The Game Awards 2017 and the 2018 Game Developers Choice Awards.
Gameplay
What Remains of Edith Finch is a story-based adventure game. As Edith, the player moves through the Finch house and nearby wilderness by exploring rooms, paths, crawlspaces, and hidden passages. Edith’s narration explains her thoughts, experiences, and connections to other characters, helping the player understand the game’s events and themes. Objects like books, decorations, and clutter in the environment allow Edith to share her journal entries, which are revealed in order as the player progresses. Throughout the game, the player visits rooms that were once the bedrooms of family members who have died. These rooms are kept as memorials since each person’s death. Players can choose to skip some parts of the story but must interact with items in these memorials to continue. Each interaction leads to a short story that explains how each family member died. These stories differ in style, perspective, and gameplay, and sometimes question whether the events described are completely true.
Plot
The player character takes a ferry to Orcas Island, Washington, carrying the journal of Edith Finch. The journal describes Edith’s return to her family’s old home on the island for the first time in seven years. At 17 years old, Edith writes that she is the last person in her family still alive. The player then experiences the story through Edith’s eyes as she explores the house and learns about the possible reasons for each family member’s death. These stories are told in different ways, making it hard to know exactly what happened.
Edith says her family believes they are cursed because many family members have died suddenly. In 1937, after the death of his wife, Ingeborg, and their newborn son, Johann, Edith’s great-great-grandfather, Odin Finch, moved from Norway to the United States with his daughter, Edith Senior (Edie), her husband, Sven, and their newborn daughter, Molly. They brought their family house with them. However, waves near Orcas Island caused the house to tip over, and Odin drowned. The family built a new home and a nearby graveyard. Edie later gave birth to Barbara, twins Calvin and Sam, and Walter.
For a time, Edie thought they had escaped the curse, but strange accidents began to happen. At age 10, Molly died after eating toothpaste with fluoride and holly berries because her mother did not care for her properly. At 16, Barbara was killed during a fight with her boyfriend. At 11, Calvin fell to his death while swinging off a cliff. At 49, Edie’s husband, Sven, died in an accident at their home. At 53, Walter, who had lived for 30 years in a bunker under the house, left and was hit by a train. Edie honored each family member by turning their bedrooms into memorials.
Sam married Kay Carlyle, and they had three children: Dawn, Gus, and Gregory. Only Dawn lived to be an adult. At 22 months old, Gregory drowned in the bathtub after being left alone. At 13, Gus was crushed by a totem pole during a storm. Sam and Kay divorced, and at 33, Sam died after falling off a cliff during a hunting trip with Dawn.
Traumatized, Dawn moved to Kolkata, India, and married Sanjay Kumar. They had three children: Lewis, Milton, and Edith (Jr.). In 2002, Sanjay died in an earthquake, and Dawn returned to the Finch home with her children. At 11 years old, Milton disappeared without explanation, and Dawn became very worried. She locked the memorials and stopped her children from learning about their family’s past, hoping to protect them.
In 2010, Lewis, who struggled with drug use and mental health, died by suicide at 21 after cutting his head off with a machine from his job. Desperate, Dawn decided to leave the house. However, Edith refused to go and stayed behind. After an argument, Dawn and Edith left without her, leaving most of their belongings. The next day, Edith was found dead at 93 after mixing alcohol with her medicine.
Seven years later, Dawn died from an unknown illness, and 17-year-old Edith inherited the house. Returning to the home, Edith learned about her family’s history and wrote about her thoughts in her journal. She also shared that she was pregnant, though the player may have already noticed this. She wrote the journal for her unborn child in case she died before telling the stories herself.
In the final scene, the player character on the ferry at the beginning of the game is revealed to be Edith’s son, Christopher. Edith died during childbirth in 2017. In the future, Christopher places flowers on his mother’s grave.
Development
What Remains of Edith Finch is the second game created by Giant Sparrow, a team led by creative director Ian Dallas. Their first game, The Unfinished Swan, won a BAFTA award. The idea for What Remains of Edith Finch came from Dallas’s goal to create an experience that makes players feel the beauty and overwhelming power of a special moment. He drew inspiration from his time as a scuba diver in Washington State, where he saw the ocean disappear into darkness. At first, the game was based on this diving idea, but it was hard to tell the story clearly. The team then decided to use floating text captions to share the story, which became an important part of the game.
The team had trouble with the diving idea until Dallas imagined a shark falling into a forest. A child in the story said, "and suddenly I was a shark." This idea led to more unusual and strange scenarios. This specific scenario became the mini-experience for Molly, who died after eating poisonous berries. Her bedroom is the first place players explore in the game. As the team developed Molly’s story, they created other mini-experiences that showed players interesting moments while hinting that the characters would soon die. This helped create the experience they wanted.
To connect these mini-experiences, the team needed a framing device. They first thought of a story similar to The Canterbury Tales set in a high school, but they later decided to use a cursed family theme, like The Twilight Zone. They also borrowed ideas from the book One Hundred Years of Solitude, which tells overlapping stories about family members. With this approach, the team focused on designing the family’s genealogy and styling the house. Dallas said they used three words to guide the house’s design: sublime, intimate, and murky. Their goal was to make the house feel like a natural force, something with order but too chaotic to fully understand.
The team designed the bedrooms in the same order players would experience them, but they realized they could use the decorations to show more about each family member. For example, Lewis’s bedroom was filled with posters and items that showed his drug use, giving players clues about his character without needing narration. The team made major changes to all the bedrooms to add similar details for each character before the game’s release.
The team wanted some mini-experiences to be open-ended, leaving players unsure if the events were real or imagined. They avoided making a horror game but used ideas from horror, like Lovecraftian elements. The game was first called The Nightmares of Edith Finch, and its early trailer had a spooky feel, like exploring a dark house with a flashlight. However, the team later changed the title and softened the eerie elements.
The game’s ending was the hardest part to create. Dallas said they struggled with whether to end the game with a mini-experience that increased unease or with a different type of closure. They eventually chose to end the story with a moment that let players reflect on what they had experienced. Suggestions from Dino Patti of Playdead and Jenova Chen of thatgamecompany inspired the ending, which included a scene showing Edith’s pregnancy. Though Dallas didn’t want players to see parts of characters’ bodies, their tech artist, Chelsea Hash, insisted on keeping it. Players who discovered this detail later found it to be a pleasant surprise.
The game was in development since at least 2013, when Giant Sparrow partnered with Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first announced in 2014 at the PlayStation Experience, with Santa Monica Studio as the publisher. However, Sony later reduced its support for indie games, and Santa Monica Studio removed the title from its lineup. Some team members from Santa Monica Studio left to form Annapurna Interactive, which became the game’s new publisher. Annapurna gave Giant Sparrow more time to refine the game, including the story of Gregory, an infant who drowns in the bath while his mother is distracted. This scene uses music from The Nutcracker by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The team brought in parents to playtest this story to ensure it was handled sensitively.
One of the most changed stories was Walter’s. He locked himself in a basement bunker after his sister’s death and later escaped through a tunnel, only to be hit by a train. Originally, Walter would see still figures that moved when he looked away and imagine living on a model train set. These ideas were cut, and the story was simplified to show Walter eating canned peaches every day until he decided to escape. Another idea that was scrapped was to have "Weird Al" Yankovic compose a song about Edith. The team also considered a scenario inspired by a man who refused to leave his home before a volcano erupted, but this idea
Reception
What Remains of Edith Finch received widespread praise across all platforms where it was released (PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch), according to the review aggregator website Metacritic.
Destructoid’s Brett Makedonski gave the game a 9/10, noting that it is "a hallmark of excellence" with minor flaws that do not significantly affect the overall experience.
Marty Sliva of IGN scored the game 8.8/10, calling it "a gorgeous experience" and one of the best examples of magical-realism storytelling in games.
Andy Chalk of PC Gamer awarded it 91 out of 100, describing it as "touching, sad, and brilliant," and stating that its story is worth experiencing despite limited interactivity.
Josh Harmon of EGMNow gave it a 7/10, calling it "a brilliant accomplishment" but also noting that it sometimes fails to meet its potential in emotionally impactful ways.
Griffin Vacheron of GameRevolution gave it 3.5 stars out of 5, explaining that while it may not resonate with everyone, it is still a worthwhile experience for those who enjoy its unique storytelling style.
Susan Arendt of Polygon scored it 9/10, concluding that the game’s stories are "enchanting" and left her "crying" at the end, calling it "love" in her final statement.
Colm Ahern of VideoGamer.com gave it a 9/10, saying it reimagines common storytelling patterns in first-person narrative games to create a "beautiful story" that is both heartbreaking and uplifting.
Eurogamer ranked the game second on their list of the "Top 50 Games of 2017," while GamesRadar+ ranked it fifth on their list of the "25 Best Games of 2017." In Game Informer’s Reader’s Choice Best of 2017 Awards, it placed fourth for "Best Adventure Game," receiving 10% of the votes. The same website also named it "Best Adventure Game" and awarded it "Best Narrative" and "Adventure Game of the Year" in its 2017 Adventure Game of the Year Awards. EGMNow ranked it 25th on their list of the "25 Best Games of 2017," and Polygon ranked it 13th on their list of the "50 Best Games of 2017."
The game won the "Best Story" award in PC Gamer’s 2017 Game of the Year Awards and was nominated for "Game of the Year." It was also nominated for "Best Xbox One Game" in Destructoid’s Game of the Year Awards 2017; for "Best Adventure Game" and "Best Story" in IGN’s Best of 2017 Awards; and for "Best Moment or Sequence" (Cannery Sequence) in Giant Bomb’s 2017 Game of the Year Awards.