Richard finch ideo3/28/2024 ![]() ![]() There are gaps in what she told me that I can never ask her to fill. No matter how accurately I remember them, I’ll never be able to tell them with the same balance of grace, eloquence and simplicity. She had an amazing memory for details, but it was more than that. But I didn’t get every story, and every detail. The conversation turned to our family’s history when I visited. She gave me the hottest family gossip every time I called. My grandmother was our family history repository. There are boxes of photographs that are lost to flooding or fire. And then there are the stories that you never get a chance to hear. Or you won’t tell them the same way when you pass them on. You forget some of the family stories you were told. A sort of “if a tree falls” parable - if you’re cursed to die early, but you don’t know it, will you die anyway? At least you won’t spend your life feeling constant dread.Įvery family has stories - even families that aren’t as tragic as the Finches. The Finches are supposed to be cursed, and Edith’s mother hoped that ignorance would protect her last living child from death. Edith is motivated to learn about her family because her mother fiercely protected Edith from their history. ![]() It’s all there in my grandmother’s house, and in Edith Finch.Įdith Finch is about stories, too. The bookshelves, the photos, the worn out things, and the doors that lead to places you don’t expect. These were memories that she wanted to keep. There were pages of her careful handwriting narrating the first days of his life, and her early relationship with my grandfather. On my grandmother’s bookshelves you could find well-thumbed Agatha Christies, children’s books dating from the 1950s up through last year and, like we recently did, the diary that my grandmother kept when my father was just born. It feels like people lived there, and of course like people died there. There’s all the junk that we accumulate through the simple act of living. There are messes left behind, including spilled wine and dirty dishes. ![]() The walls are galleries of family photos. There are floor-to-ceiling shelves jammed with books. The house is one of the more impressive feats of environmental design in gaming. Each section effectively breaks up what could be described, not unkindly, as a walking simulator. These vignettes punctuate the first-person gameplay with splashes of beauty, or abstraction. The player lives each scene as a playable vignette. They come from the things we leave behind when we go. These details come from letters, from photographs or from comic books. You have to find your way into the locked rooms and discover artifacts that elaborate on each death. They all died strangely, in unlucky circumstances, and at too young an age. You explore the house and its grounds as Edith.Įdith’s mother locked the bedrooms of the dead Finches in an effort to protect Edith and her brothers from learning too much about the “family curse” - the simple fact that Finches can’t seem to stay alive. It’s about three hours from where I grew up the messy rainforests are familiar and the sudden, breathtaking views of water are part and parcel of growing up on the Peninsula. The Finch house is deep in the woods on Orcas Island, in Washington State. Edith is returning to her family home to learn the stories her mother never told her, the ones about the generations of Finches who died before their time. The places we liveĮdith Finch is a game about a family, but it’s also about a house. Spoiler warning: This article contains unspecific spoilers about the plot of What Remains of Edith Finch. It’s a narrative game it took a couple of hours. I had a long list of games to get through before December ended. You can take all that regret, sadness and anger and just channel it into video games. Instead of dwelling on the memory of your grandmother’s voice, for example, you could feel irrationally, unfathomably angry that you haven’t had time to play Prey. One of the stranger parts of this job is the need to deal with major life events while also being really stressed out about video games. Then back to New York, to sink into the chaos of Polygon’s Game of the Year work. Then back to New York to edit silly videos for YouTube. One weekend I was in Boston, doing a vigil in the hospice while she was in a coma. I spent December ping-ponging around the East coast. She had a stroke and passed away a month or so later. She told me she would live for a few more years. We tore apart a rotten tree stump in her garden using ski poles. I last visited her in Vermont, during an unseasonably warm October. Our brains must do that to protect us, because grief flattens you when it finally hits. It doesn’t feel like my grandmother is gone most of the time. ![]()
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