It's an incredible game, a masterpiece, whatever it is. It's definitely one of the best games I've ever played in my life. People generally don't like walking simulations, but I played Firewatch at the right time and fell in love with the genre, and when I started to understand why people don't like the genre, I was slapped in the face with this game.

People have been telling stories for years. This is the most basic thing that makes us human. We communicate. Every communication is a story. These stories don't necessarily have to be fictionalized things with a beginning and an end. "I will go to school tomorrow." is also a story. The truth is that people cannot survive without this feature. The whole fabric of society is built on communication. Today, despite having no physical advantages, humans have survived the evolutionary process and dominate the globe. And of course the main reason for this is communication. Humans communicated with gestures, writing on stones, using keyboards as I do now, using smoke. So when it comes to communication, it was not difficult for us to produce tools. Today, even if we are left in the most foreign country, we somehow manage to communicate with our gestures. No matter how much a person communicates, the speed of language cannot keep up with the speed of thought. He always thinks more than he speaks, and these thoughts cannot be communicated. But man also knows that he will die. He also sees that when he dies, these thoughts will go away. And although he cannot prevent himself from leaving, he can prevent his thoughts from disappearing. "Word flies and writing remains" becomes a proverb. One must somehow hide one's thoughts. That is why writing exists. For a long time, people have written their thoughts on stones, on paper and even on cave walls. Thus, even if they disappeared, they would still be living among those texts. The reason I am writing this article today is basically the same. I am trying to continue my existence in some way, because one day when I disappear and die, I will have left my thoughts in these writings. And not only after death, but after a long time, I will forget my thoughts about this play, and before I forget them, I pass them here, thus immortalizing my thoughts. This is exactly why people tell stories. They immortalize their thoughts, so that they can relieve some of the fear of extinction that death provides. These stories have survived mostly in writing, but if you have read The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, you know that architecture, sculpture, fashion also tell stories. Everything produced by human beings carries something from human beings and tells stories. In the book, Frollo says that with the advent of the printing press, people found an easier way to tell stories, that architecture was no more, and he is right, there are no churches like Notre-Dame today. Because those churches are not only beautiful, they also contain stories that people cannot tell. The church is like a book for the person who can read it. It is funny that Hugo devotes more than 100 pages of the book to telling the church, both the book and the church tell stories, but they do it in different ways. Here Hugo actually paints us a picture of how the story of the church stands on a book.

Fast forward a little further in history and we meet radios and televisions. With these devices came songs and TV programs. There were always songs, but just as books became the main source of storytelling with the spread of the printing press, music took the throne from books with the spread of radio. Then came television and cinema, which are now very popular storytelling tools. And at the very end of the timeline are games. Games offer us a very different way than other tools. Interacting with this story. Games are no longer just playable stories, they present us with the universe and give us the opportunity to write our own story. In these games, from Baldur's Gate to Skyrim, instead of playing in the universes given to us as the games want, we play as if we belong to that universe and do what we want. In this way, games go far beyond storytelling: Story writing. And so they perfectly respond to the deepest human needs. We all have save files of our games somewhere, even if it doesn't seem important if we ask today. Those files are our stories.

So what does all this have to do with this game? This game, my friends, is one of the highest level ways of storytelling I have ever seen. Of course games already are, but this game is set up in such a way that even the best motion picture you've ever seen is just pixels on a screen. This game is the best storytelling game I've ever seen and there's no rival. This game is the biggest proof of why games are the best storytelling medium. Sometimes it locks you to the screen as if you were watching a movie, sometimes it makes you get lost in the story as if you were the narrator. You watch the same family characters through different eyes, you become one of them. You don't realize it while you are playing, but when you listen to Gregory's story you play with toys like a baby, when you listen to Lewis's story you never focus on your work and you are interested in your dream, when you listen to Calvin's story you want to fly as much as he does. So this game takes you in without you even realizing it, which is really scary. When you're looking at the screen without a helmet on your head, you realize that you're completely disconnected from real life. Whatever character the game presents you with, you really are that character. While doing all this, you are constantly traveling around the house, listening to all the stories. After you get out of all these incredible stories, you either cry or frown when you watch the end credits.

What Remains of Edith Finch is one of the most precious games I have ever played. I don't remember a game where I've been so involved in the story and so impressed by it. I don't know what I can comment about the gameplay because there is no gameplay in the game. We just switch to whichever character is being told and we experience a different gameplay. It's like we're playing a different game here because basically the only task in the game is to walk. So when you're not walking in the game, you can be more convinced of the reality of the game. Switching to different gameplays for each family member and getting lost in the gameplays makes this game one of the most special games in the world.

The art design is great and the music is not as good as I expected. If it had much better music, it would have been one of the few games in history, but that's as far as it goes. What I saw and heard in the game already impressed me enough.

What Remains of Edith Finch tells the story of a curse. I love stories of curses. And it does it better than any other work can do it. I don't remember being so impressed by a play for a long time. It was one of the rare games I want my girlfriend to play. I recommend it to everyone from 7 to 70 and leave my long speech here. I can't describe this play, go play it.

Reviewed on May 11, 2024


1 Comment


15 days ago

wow