secret game club presents...
what remains of edith finch
words by lulu loveless
may 2025
When I was younger, my Dad knew I was interested in Animation, and had me (and my brother) watch every Animated Short Film (then) nominated for an Oscar, this was my first real exposure to a lot of weirder, in some cases, adult oriented animation, I remember one time we even watched these in a theatre at a local University, it had to have been around 2017 (coincidence?) because I remember seeing a poster for a showing of suspiria, and I said that the (then) recent remake of the classic film was good, my dad said he’d heard the opposite. The point of my rambling is this, What Remains of Edith Finch is the closest I’ve ever come to recreating that experience in a video game, a series of connected tales that draw the player in like spiders web of fiction that the player gradually untangles.
Carrying a lot of the same emotionally dark yet twee stylings as these shorts (after all, child death with pretty and flowery prose is a different feeling to regular child death) this sort of styling is found all over “walking simulators” and can sometimes act as a point of derision, in the same way that your dad might deride a local café and it’s gluten free offerings for being “hipster shit”, in the wake of a world that seems to want to move away from this kind of millennial-isms, (and will likely one day become nostalgic for it, as is the cycle of all things) we move further and further away from a world of Gone Home’s and indie game’s attempts for “serious” artistic recognition. Though, for what it’s worth, I personally think Edith Finch will be one to stand out in the end, it’s messier aspects only heightening it (sharks sharks sharks Sharks).
Today, I now stand as a grown-woman who has watched Suspiria, but not Suspiria (barbed wire barbed wire barbed wire Barbed wire), and who, instead of animating short films of her own, now has to make a point of a game whose point is made mostly by it’s own existence, a slice of the era of the interactive short film brought on by the larger start of 3d indie game development. Still though, I’m done pontificating on this topic and I’ve grown bored of it. If you don’t play this game all in one sitting while sipping on a cold one getting tipsy enough to giggle in shock at the child death, what are you even doing with your life, man.
our score:
