I lived in the same house until I was 18. The same house with its faded blue garage door and the dining room window that faced the sun at the hottest part of the day. My family history feels like it's collected inside that house, worn into the walls like dirt.
If I inherited that house tomorrow, I would sell it. Given the chance, memories can overwhelm a place and become invisible barriers hemming you in. Live somewhere long enough, and you wear a groove into the floor so deep that walking anywhere else becomes difficult.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a game about a house and the burden of painful memories. The Finch house sits alone and ungainly, isolated off the coast of Washington. A series of additions resulted in a spire of conflicting architectural styles reaching toward the sky. Each room was built for a member of a family that spans generations. Each is sealed shut, and inside lie memorials in the form of diaries, letters, poems and paintings. Every room is a gravestone, the house a mausoleum. You see, everyone in Edith Finch's family is dead.
Everyone except Edith, who is 17 and trying to make sense of it all. At the beginning of the game, she returns to the house, journal in hand, to record her family's stories. In doing so, she braves her own emotional baggage and rumors of a family curse, possibly associated with the house itself, that he return even more unnerving.
Annapurna Interactive
