Imagine going back to your childhood home, reminiscing in memories of the past, only to find out that there is an even deeper, darker story about your family. Throughout the game, What Remains of Edith Finch, you must take a journey down memory lane, experiencing the deaths of each family member, and attempting to figure out just what this “curse” on the family was. What Remains of Edith Finch has superb puzzles, mind-boggling psychological elements, and interactive game mechanics which highly enhance not only the character’s story, but the overall player experience.

As you go through the game, you are guided into bedrooms of the now passed family members, each with clues/journals which help to tell how that family member died. One room had an extremely powerful story, and it was because of the game mechanics involved in telling that story that made it immensely immersive. This story was extremely informative as well because you learned everything you needed to, all while experiencing the characters physical and mental state. Lewis Finch, a fish canner, a hippie, and most importantly he was schizophrenic, to an extent. To start, you are just performing Lewis’ day to day job of chopping fish heads using a mini guillotine and praying that you will not chop off your own hand. As you are doing this, you are hearing Lewis’ psychologist in the background describing how he was in sessions and giving you insight on the things he was seeing. After a few rounds of fish chopping, there is a mini game which appears in the top left of the screen. This mini game is very small, not very detailed, and is easily played, however the catch is that you must keep performing Lewis’ job simultaneously. As you play through the mini game, it slowly progresses and becomes more complex both in art style, and the controls needed to play it. This is what Lewis was experiencing every day, and every day his life would become more consumed by an alternate reality, thus the mini game in the corner would become more complex and begin to take over more of your screen, all while you are still trying to perform Lewis’ job. As you begin to reach the end of his story, the mini game has completely taken over the screen, and the art style went from plain 2D characters with black and white coloring, to a 3D, fully colored world, like a utopia. When you reach the end of the minigame, Lewis’ also dies to a guillotine, which is quite ironic given his occupation. Game mechanics such as taking over the screen with an alternate reality, are what help to push the story even further into the player’s mind, giving them even more to grasp onto and giving them the chance to experience what the character truly went through. No one truly knows what another person has been through unless they experience it themselves, and that is exactly what this game mechanic allows the player to do.

The next story also held no lack of seriously compelling and interactive game mechanics, all driving the story of the character that much further. Molly, Edith’s great aunt, had a very tragic death at the young age of 10. Her story started off with her parents sending her to bed hungry, which leads her to try and find food around her room. Unfortunately, some of the items she decided to eat were not good and quite toxic. After she ate all, she could in her room, she peers out the window and notices a bird, which makes you jump out the window, turn into a cat, and proceed to chase the bird until ultimately eating it. It does not stop there, however. After she eats the bird, she then becomes an owl and wants to hunt the mother rabbits, then a shark which hunts mother seals. The final form she becomes is a sea monster of sorts, that grabs sailors and eats them. When she gets back to her room, she knows the beast is underneath her bed, to which she says, “that I’m going to be delicious (Molly Finch, 2017, L1).” These game mechanics were key to showing the player what Molly went through, and truly made the story interesting. The aspect of truly having no choice but to eat these animals and eventually people is a largely psychologically thrilling element to the story. It also provides the foundation for the game and story, as this is the first story you will experience as a player. It gives you insight into what you will experience as you go throughout each family members room. The mechanic of becoming a bigger predator each time you eat an animal, gives away to the fact that Molly is wanting to ultimately gain power and perhaps eat her parents. It also shows that her hunger was taking over her, like a disease.

At this point, you are probably wondering to yourself, so what? What about this game and its mechanics makes it worthy of an analysis? The story of What Remains of Edith Finch is a complex one, and there are many elements of the game that do not present themselves easily. It takes someone to read in between the lines and present this information. These mechanics are compelling and make the player want to immerse themselves more and learn more about the story. A lot of people tend to focus on just the story and getting to the end, however if we look at the world of Edith Finch, there is so much more to be looked upon and analyzed such as the game mechanics behind all the stories, which only help to emphasize the characters experiences. There are many other authors out there who feel the same way, for example, “But you do it anyway. The story compels. Only in Edith Finch, you don’t just read and sympathize you have to take the controls yourself and make it happen (Ditum, 2017).” Game mechanics matter, they drive the story, and they make the player analyze more than they would otherwise. They also drive the player to make hasty decisions, to make it through the game and reach the end, all while absorbing the information that is being conveyed. Bottom line is, game mechanics are a very important element to the game, and they give the foundation to go even deeper and analyze the game in ways no one ever has. It opens a new world and will continue to for many years to come. Games are only going up from here, and so will the game mechanics and design, making it even more important to analyze and gain information for future generations of gamers to look back on and appreciate.

Works Cited

Ditum, Sarah. “What Remains of Edith Finch and the Art of Inevitability.” Eurogamer.net, Eurogamer.net, 19 Aug. 2017, www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-08-19-what-remains-of-edith-finch-and-the-art-of-inevitability.

What Remains of Edith Finch. Windows PC version, Giant Sparrow, 2017.