A genre that depends so much on that “other way of doing things” and that put the narrative before the mechanics is easy to end up tripping over their own clichés and limitations. But it seems that it was necessary for the drop to fill the glass so that it could be filled
with new concepts. What Remains of Edith Finch represents these new ideas of the genre. Some that have become to me to seduce like the first walks of that Dear Esther, the mystery of Gone Home or the catharsis of Beginner’s Guide.
Edith Finch represents the magic that exists in real life. Like Tim Burton’s Big Fish at the time of letting the viewer choose what is better, if the truth is cold or sweetened; As the Inception of Christopher Nolan allowing you to decide if everything is still a
dream, this family’s house is full of small great stories where tragedy is the constant. A family curse that poisons the family tree for more than a century and that seems to have no end. Because where there is life there is death. But where there is death, there is also life.
Edith’s return home is slow and heavy with only a key in her hand to reveal all the secrets of a house that twists and expands as if it were growing with each member of the family. Our purpose: to discover the lives of each of our relatives who hide
a terrible curse that seems to have been inherited to this day. There are no puzzles per se, but the mansion itself is a gigantic labyrinth th
at hides lives and truths behind closed and reinforced doors. It will be in each one of these stories that the first surprises arrive in playable forms full of imagination and the main causes of the great sensations it provokes in the player. Moments that little we can describe, because each of them is worth being discovered by oneself.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
A What Remains of Edith Finch not come as in other games of the genre. Do not tire your left thumb for taking your character in a straight line or everything is built for a big final surprise, although on the way it is impossible not to marvel at each of the unexpected stories that are presented to us.
The Finch family house mixes the impossible with the wonderful. A labyrinth full of secret passages and closed doors.
The magic of Giant Sparrow is not to run away from the word video game, without the need to strictly associate the “adventure” with the puzzles, or create a war between history and playability. Through letters, photographs, poems, stories, comics and,
above all, the memories of this family, we will do more than walk forward. And, while we do it, the story will go on magically before our eyes, with those letters constantly superimposed on each corner of the stage reminding us that this, more than a fact, is a story. And the pages, as they are happening, resuscitate the characters they contain.
The magic of Giant Sparrow is not to run away from the word video game
To make matters worse, Edith Finch does not hide in the simplicity of the low budget. His ultra-realistic style builds a house and surroundings completely overloaded to the impossible, the exuberant and the fabulous. Where all the rooms of each
No need to say more about What Remains of Edith Finch to be attracted to its cover. It is a short experience, and each one must choose how and w
hen to enjoy it, but once you do, you can not stop devouring it until its conclusion. An ending that does not need spectacular narrative turns or redeeming catharsis, like the one that closes our own real life. What remains of it, however, remains unchanged in the memories of those we left behind.
