a deeply upsetting experience. perfectly captures the feeling of bitter nostalgia - reminiscing over awful times. there are stories in this that are so beautiful it's absolutely insane.

could easily see this in 5 stars but i'm not sure how i feel about the way this game treats death. the core message feels like it's about accepting death, but it falls into a kinda common trope i see where the deaths are pointless and preventable. this isn't a huge fault but it does make me like the game a bit less. high recommendation though.

I have never seen something like this story before, anywhere

One of the first things that dragged my attention was that feeling that "Unpacking" gave me. Discovering stuff about someone's past by their objects is amazing. Also, It's strange how the Finch's house itself looks so alive and so dead at the same time.

It starts in a fun way with molly, but suddenly you're involved and didn't see 2 hours passing away. Even the credits are well thought, going from upstairs to downstairs rooms.

Damn, Annapurna!

Enjoyment - 10/10
Difficulty - 2/10

Subverts expectations and challenges conventional video game storytelling, leaving an immeasurable impact.
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Perhaps the best narrative game I know. The game has a rather morbid theme - it's about experiencing and uncovering all the deaths of countless family members. This is achieved with very innovative graphical but also playful ideas. I was particularly surprised by the fact that the game has such interesting gameplay to offer, because you don't tend to expect that in story games. The playing time is perfect, just right for an evening. Rarely have I played such a good narrative game, pretty much everything fits here, writing, gameplay, atmosphere...it's a feast.

Top 50 Favorites: #8

"A lot of this isn't going to make sense to you, and I'm sorry about that."

Fate exists and it's a cruel motherfucker - memories as a beautiful watercolor painted with blood and tears. Best story writing ever in a video game, maybe in any piece of media/entertainment ever. Deals with how we cope not only with mortality, but with the inherent unfairness that exists in society - when the people we love most and who love us the most cause us the most pain (which is then enacted right back onto them). Unrelenting beauty and deep, bone-chilling melancholy in an inescapable dance to see which will have the biggest imprint on your life. Art design here is a knockout, this was the first game I played which really opened my eyes to the power of the eighth generation of gaming. So amazing that it eviscerated the "walking sim" genre of game in its tracks, because how the hell can you even compete with this? (Even goes the extra mile with an audacious tie-in to another one of my all-time favorite games). Impossible to forget. I love you but this is going to hurt like hell.

Imersivo, cativante e instigante, 'What Remains of Edith Finch' é uma joia dos videogames baseados em narrativas. Desde o momento em que mergulhei no mundo assustadoramente belo da família Finch, fiquei fascinada por sua profundidade emocional.

Com certeza esse deve ser o maior triunfo de “What Remains of Edith Finch” é a sua capacidade de evocar emoções genuínas. Da tristeza de partir o coração às explosões inesperadas de alegria, o jogo leva os jogadores a uma montanha-russa emocional.
É uma prova do poder da narrativa nos videogames, lembrando-nos da capacidade única do meio de provocar introspecção e empatia.

Concluindo, ‘What Remains of Edith Finch’ é uma jornada bela. Com sua narrativa evocativa e visuais impressionantes, é um exemplo brilhante da arte e da profundidade emocional que os videogames podem alcançar. Quer você seja um jogador experiente ou alguém novo no meio, uma experiência dessas deve ser notada.

Some self-serious hacks with no apparent interest in making a video game at all try to do their own GONE HOME while cutting every corner imaginable.

Shoves the most tired, obvious, weak, and unearned sob-story shit down your throat without offering even the barest pretense of interactivity or exploration to justify itself. I'm definitely not one to rip walking simulators by default, but seriously, this IS JUST a movie where you hold W and do some incredibly shitty faux-motion control things to keep it from pausing itself. And I wish it had been a movie, because if it were, it would have been ignored in that universe rather than feted endlessly by the no-taste-having idiots who write about games professionally, prompting me to have to one day play it.

Best parts of this were all the leaden and self-conscious references to things like Grey Gardens and Blow Out and Halloween and SUPER MARIO BROS. because, to paraphrase the saying, they briefly reminded me of things I'd rather be doing.

I was going to give this like 1 1/2 stars for some of the cute visual stuff, but then I got to the part where you get to play as a baby in first-person as they drown to death, and yeah, the people who made this game can suck my dick from the back.

O melhor: As diferentes e fascinantes formas de apresentar cada história
O pior: A estrutura muito linear pode incomodar um pouco
Memória: Como alguém péssimo em guardar nomes, aprecio muito o menu de pause desse jogo

What Remains of Edith Finch é um adventure em primeira pessoa, de mecânicas extremamente simples e com foco em sua narrativa. Quem jogou o jogo anterior da Giant Sparrow, The Unfinished Swan, vai encontrar semelhanças temáticas, e quem jogou obras como Gone Home e Firewatch (os "walking simulators", como alguns gostam de chamar), também vai se sentir familiarizado aqui.

A história mostra Edith Finch retornando para a casa que abrigou quatro gerações de sua família. Última Finch viva, Edith explora cada cômodo do curioso lugar e, através de totens e documentos dedicados à cada pessoa que ali viveu, faz descobertas sobre o trágico destino de cada um deles. O jogo então se torna uma antologia, abordando os últimos momentos de cada um dos Finchs, mas com uma boa dose de realismo mágico, que faz o jogador questionar a veracidade de cada uma dessas histórias.

O maior esforço em What Remains está nas formas únicas de apresentar o destino dos familiares da Edith. Há diferentes "gatilhos" para cada história, seja um diário, uma carta ou uma foto, por exemplo. E esses objetos dão início há uma (curta) sessão única em visual e gameplay, de acordo com a personalidade de cada personagem. De controlar um tubarão barranco abaixo, até jogar dentro de uma HQ de terror, é fascinante a criatividade para tratar o que são, na verdade, grandes tragédias.

É um jogo bem melancólico, mas nunca grosseiro, e consegue apresentar mesmo as questões mais delicadas de uma forma bem sublime. Especificamente, as histórias de Gregory e de Lewis me causaram maior impacto, mas, além das histórias em si, refletir sobre o contexto geral da vida de toda essa família me trouxe uma grande apreciação por esse jogo. Isso é reforçado também pela ótima apresentação visual e sonora, com uma trilha que dá o tom perfeito para cada cena.

Eu recomendo mesmo para quem tem certo preconceito contra esse tipo de jogo (ou, melhor ainda, contra vídeo games de modo geral). É fácil (e recomendável) terminar em uma única sessão, e é um ótimo exemplo do que a mídia pode fazer em favor da narrativa.

Death is an inevitability.

Yet we spend such great parts of our life worried and anxious about it, trying to escape it, feeling sad and crushed about meeting it, grieving everything that we cared about inevitably succumbing to the great reaper.

It is as natural part of life as birth, perhaps even more so - you might not be born, but you will die.

What Remains of Edith Finch might seem as only about death. You will notice it for the first time when you open the Options menu - the book with their family tree is right there, and if you look at it for even a bit, you might notice something strange - only one name doesn't have a death date.

And far too many that do, have one too close to birth for comfort.

Indeed, the Finch family seems plagued by death, some in their old age, most in young, one terribly so; and you step into the shoes of the only living member of the family and through her eyes explore the huge family house from which no room of a dead person has ever been removed, only new parts have been added for the newly received.

It is a house of death, a literal museum of the family Finch, the rooms of its members kept in pristine conditions of the day they died - so deeply obsessed are the leaders of the family with memory that even a living twin had to share their room with the dead one for 8 years. It's a tragedy, and suffice to say, this family should really have moved on.

And yet the game is not nearly as morbid or as depressing as it sounds. Even within the most tragic of tales (even within the one I had the most difficulty playing through since my own child is the closest to that age, those moments mere miniature drops of time behind), there is hope and the acknowledgement of the beauty of life. A boy dies, but also flies; a man dies, but also lives; a girl dies, but within gives the greatest performance of her life; and so on. Within their deaths, they are not dying, but living, however short it might seem.

And you see it all through their eyes - within their rooms, you come upon the missives of their last memories and by entering them, you will learn what made them tick, and see their final moments; and again - while it sounds depressing, in the moment, it is not really so.

It is only afterwarfs that the real weight of this empty house and all those dead kids really hit me. The game, even within its very last moments, looks at death with acceptance and not with despair, but just a little dry sense of loss, as if it's too bad we didn't get to take the afternoon tea, but oh well, such is life.

Such is life, and such is dead; and What Remains of Edith Finch is the best walking sim I've ever played, and a surefire inclusion in my all time favourite games.

What's more, I yearn to walk again through the cluttered corridors and hidden passages of the childhood home of Edith Finch, even if all I'll meet there will be my lonely thoughts, the lingering ghosts, and the unavoidable fact of death. But what beauty as well!

This was for sure quite a beautiful experience.

It’s pretty well known that any drama about families require essentially two things to be interesting: people tragically dying at a young age, and people going crazy. This game understands this basic premise, probably a bit too much (almost every member of this fucked up family either dies young or goes berzerk), but it still effective at being compelling and emotional.

I would like to point out, also, how well mini games are implemented here. Sure, some of these mini-games feel like baby’s first unity mobile app game design, but still, they work just great, and more importantly, they come as a nice surprise in their context but without breaking the mood of the whole story/game.

Pretty short game, i finished it in only two sittings, so there’s no excuse to not play it, and there’s also tons of beautiful moments to find out here.

The game has a lot to show and always throws something new and interesting to the player. The story is simple and intriguing. Overall, the game is very pretty.

I feel like the linear structure and cinematic walking wasn't really necessary, as most of the game happens through transitioning into a new environment when you interact with something in the house. Having a more "movable" character and a free house to explore (like Gone Home, for example) would have been more interesting in my opinion. If there's a part of the game that doesn't add anything, it's surely slowly crawling through a hole, although I get that they wanted to pace the game like a movie (which it isn't, it's a game after all).

The game has many details but the overly linear and cinematic experience doesn't really emphasize going back to find them, so I do think it's a miss on that part. It doesn't feel as natural as finding something in Gone Home or maybe Deus Ex, for example.