Throwing Spaghetti at the Wall

What Remains of Edith Finch was a curious game, more novel than game. The game mechanics are minimal, and most of the stories are experiential.

The whole episode takes place on the lonely Oregon coast, inside a strange house. The physical design work is just gorgeous, as the house is stuffed with clutter, photos, and flaws.

From beginning to end, it's about two hours.

In summary, a pregnant 17 year old woman returns to the strange house of her upbringing, following where a key takes her, learning the stories of her family. The house is filled with sealed off rooms, with each room being a memorial to the person who once lived there, each preserved as they were left.

Each of those people died.

Each of those stories is told by an unreliable narrator.

Overall, the feel is Lovecraftian, which hints of horror, but never really shows it. Even the story of the cursed family emphasizes that.

However, this is not the story of horror. On sitting with it, from beginning to end, this is a story that invites you to believe in the Lovecraftian horror, but you are the one who brings that into the story. You are the one who imposes the supernatural.

As I said, all narrators are unreliable.

The house itself is a shrine to itself, so much so that each generation has to build more and more areas to live in. In the most literal sense, the house is story upon story of its generations.

This is a tale of grief, and how, by holding onto the past, by holding onto grief, the family cannot thrive. Death is a part of life, and death is not a curse.

In a normal house, in a normal family, rooms would get emptied out and re-used. They''d repaint the walls and redo the furniture. The dead would give way to the living. That doesn't happen here. The rooms are literally sealed shut with foam insulation, with peephole drilled into the doors so that you can see the rooms. It's only by comparing normalcy to this place that the real villain appears.

The ending is indicative here. The protagonist passes away, and it's the protagonist's son who concludes the tale, laying flowers on her grave. This is the only mourning that we see. He wasn't there for the house, or the shrines, or the stories, or the family, he was there to mourn his mother and lay flowers on her grave.

Nowhere else, in the entire story, do we see mourning.

By this simple act, he broke the family curse. 

I didn't know that I needed this game, but I needed this game.

Back in December, I bought a bunch of games that I normally wouldn't buy. GRIS was one of them.

Thematically, GRIS is a game that begin with downfall, hopelessness, grief, depression, and sorrow. The rest of the game is climbing out of that sorrow. That's amazing for a platformer and a puzzle solver.

This game is so beautiful, so stylized, so serene that my wife just stayed with me for a while and watched me play. She never watches such games, but she watches this one. She sucked through her teeth every time she saw Gris fall.

Falling is okay. It's among the first things that you learn. You fall and you get back up. There is no judgement.

There are some platforms that only appear once you jump. They're like trust falls. You leap into that trust. You trust that the sequence will lead you someone.

The world itself begins as monochrome, but as you reach points of intense grief, a single color returns to the world, adding to the pallet.

Every mechanic seems to lend itself to these emotional and social concepts. 

And there are no words. The game just trusts you. It trusts you to figure out what to do and where to go. Sometimes it introduces a concept, but it does so in such context that you're barely aware of the introduction.

While some parts of the game depend on speed and timing, most don't. In many places, you simply travel, through all these amazing scenes, resting between puzzles. You get to rest. 

The soundtrack is low key, understated, and intense as required. Its always saying that the game continues, as it will, at your own pace, with your own requirements. 

I don't think that I've written a game review after just one day before, but this was noteworthy. In these troubled days, I feel grief, sorrow, anger, and a host of other emotions. I need the time to be with them.