The Partial Pieces of the Family Tree

What Remains of Edith Finch details the title character's return to a family home she hasn't seen in years. Not since her mother took her away, leaving her great-grandmother Edie (actually Edith Sr., but "Edie" is going to be easier to differentiate her from the younger Edith) behind.

Edie vanished. Presumed dead, but there's no body, no trace of her. Edith hasn't returned in the idea of finding her, so much as maybe trying to understand what the hell is going on with her family. Because pretty much everyone dies under bizarre or disturbing circumstances. Her mother's response was to seal off almost every door in the house, and Edie's response was to drill peepholes.

As it turns out, there's one, mostly empty, room still open, and it's there Edith learns there are other ways to get into the rooms. So you move from room-to-room, studying the lives of people who mostly died decades before Edith was ever born. The rooms were preserved as is even before Edith's mom started closing them up like she was entombing someone who she perceived as insulting her family's honor, which makes it feel less like Edith is roaming through a familiar house, and more like she snuck into a very strange museum.

In each room, there's some item, that once Edith finds it, triggers a vision or recreation of the person's end. These are the parts that are most like a game, as you have a little more control. Great-Aunt Molly's diary details her waking up and feeling so hungry since she was sent to bed without supper, that she turns into a cat, chasing a barn swallow through the tree branches outside her window. Then she's an owl, and you guide her over snowy fields, before making her swoop down to snatch rabbits and swallow them whole.

Edith's older uncle's epitaph is a poem her mother wrote about him refusing to participate in their father's wedding to his second wife, opting to fly his kite instead. You guide the kite across the sky scattering the words of Dawn's poems, or knocking them loose from where they're wedged against a wood sculpture.

The visuals shift depending on whose story you're exploring. Great-Aunt Barbara's story is told as a comic book, with cell-shading that reminds me of that Gamecube game Killer 7, where you wield a crutch as a weapon. Edith's younger brother Milton's is a flip book, with simple cartoon characters. The depiction of the fantasy world her older brother used to escape the drudgery of his job seems artistically like Journey, though maybe that's just the robes the ancillary characters wear.

The game tells me I found all the stories, which means I don't know what's going on with this family. Edie's father left Norway to escape the ill fortune that dogged the Finch family, but tried bringing his house with him. They both sank. Dawn seemed convinced the stories Edie would tell were somehow responsible for what was happening, but Edith never learns what that means. So we're left with questions. Where the hell did Milton go? What actually killed Barbara? I'm left wondering why there was a train line on a remote island to where Walter could get run over by it. Edith gets there by ferry at the start of the game, so what the hell was the train connecting?

I don't have the answer, and I don't think Edith does, either. Which is too bad, since she seemed to be there looking for something to pass on. I guess it provides a lesson that you lose people, and you may not ever understand why, or even how. I figure there's probably something in not following either Edie or Dawn's approaches.

There are all these pieces or sights that suggest the house was slowly coming to a halt. Each time someone died, the place associated with it was fenced off, to be left unchanged and sacrosanct. But at a certain point, what's left for anyone to live in? At the same time, Dawn seems like she's following "out of sight, out of mind." Whatever she thinks is picking off Finches one after another, she also thought could be contained by closing doors. Literal, in terms of the house, and figurative in how she closes off from Edie and keeps Edith from any answers.

Which leaves me wondering how to interpret her giving Edith a key that would unlock the secret passages. A recognition avoidance was no answer? Edith mentions she hadn't been back since they left, and that, once she gets there, she realizes the feeling she always had at seeing the house was fear. So it seems like there was little chance she would have gone back snooping on her own, if Dawn was worried about that, and figured she might as well give Edith a safer way to explore.