The Patreon Letters - 2nd December 2017

Hey there, everyone! 

It’s Jackson here with another Patreon Letter, I hope you’re having a good day! Ok, that’s not true. I know you’re not having a good day, none of us are having a good day right now. So let’s get this party started and talk about death!

What Remains of Edith Finch is fantastic. If you have not played What Remains of Edith Finch, stop reading this and go correct this grave error. It’s on Steam, it’s on PS4, it costs twenty bucks. It is worth every single penny. Consider this your warning because I am about to talk about the ending. Edith Finch is  almost certainly my favourite game of the year, and I don’t want to take that joy from you. Ok? Are we all good? Here we go.

Edith Finch is a game where you play as a baby and drown yourself in a joyous suicide. You play as a ten year old girl, playing as a shark, rolling down a hill. You play as a man who spends thirty years in one room so traumatized by the death around him that he forgets to live. One day, he wakes up, and realizes he isn’t scared anymore. He resolves to leave, to live his life to the fullest, and so you guide him into the path of an oncoming train. Edith Finch does not have a sense of tragedy, or a sense of humour. Instead it knows these are one and the same.

The basic premise of Edith Finch is that you return to your childhood home and explore the space in order to uncover the stories of your family. You have, so to say, Gone Home. This is a comparison that Finch makes consciously; it serves to both place the game in the context of (long sigh) walking simulators, in order to make the ways Finch diverges from the template even more pronounced. Gone Home is a a tactile game, one where you trawl through papers, photos, books, tapes, magazines, boxes, and hope you have enough to gain a complete story of the Greenbriar family. In Gone Home, with enough investigation, you can find out the truth. 

On the other hand, Edith Finch offers no such possibility. The stories it tells are always unreal and often absurd. They exist more to capture the emotional essence of the person now deceased than they do to reveal the truth. Some vignettes - like Molly’s, or Lewis’ - offer clear explanations of what happened in the “real world,” but some don’t. We will never know what happened to Milton, or to Barbara, or to Edie. All we have are stories, and we have to make do.

But Edith Finch’s questionable relationship with reality goes deeper than the obvious choice to tell its stories in ambiguous and metaphorical vignettes; the game itself is one of these stories. You - the player - aren’t exploring the house, you’re reading a book. The Finch house itself is ridiculous, Edith apparently lived for her entire childhood in a room made of wood hanging off the side of the house’s fourth floor. Walter lived in the basement for thirty years and nobody ever knew that he was there. On closer examination, the game’s truth is just as unreliable as the game’s clearly marked fantasies.

The Finch’s family curse comes up again and again; are they  cursed? Or is it their belief in the curse that makes it true? I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the game that suggests Edith Finch is trying to argue the dangers of mythologizing, of when we become so obsessed with stories that we forget this is all just life, happening, and it is what it is. I understand that read - they’re living in a house made of locked rooms they never open, the weight of these stories is tearing this family apart. But I think more than that, Edith Finch is about our deep, unbreakable need for stories such as these.

Stories are vehicles for understanding and catharsis, and you leave every vignette feeling like, for a brief moment, you understood someone. When you start Edith Finch, you think you’re going to solve a mystery, but you come away with so much more. It is a game where you climb to the top of a rickety structure, into a caravan that stinks of weed, and live out your brother’s suicide. Every part of it is absurd, hilarious, tragic and so impossibly human.