What Remains of Edith Finch is what happens when someone tries to make something like Dear Esther, but attempts to give a hopeful and whimsical approach... But fails miserably, because the story is so depressing, the characters are all drags, and the moral itself is a complete dud.
The game's story is so confused that the moral, "life is short and strange, but should be celebrated", is almost completely undone by how pathetic it portrays life to be. Yes, these family members are... Interesting enough, but their only interesting aspect is their deaths (sometimes). The only people who take joy from their existence are people who wonder about their deaths.
And everyone is dead. Spoiler alert: everyone is dead and gone. You're walking through an empty house with no hope, alone, and feeling like you'd rather be anywhere else. The game does bring around emotions, but I personally found that I was having so little enjoyment out of the story that I wanted to be far away from it.
It doesn't even sit as a tribute to family and love. Unravel did a great job at that. Unravel made you feel what it was like to watch life move on. This game makes everyone either look like a jerk, look stupid, or just look like a depressed shell. The 'family' is just a collection of anecdotes.
As a relatively stressed person, this game didn't make me feel like life was worth living. It made me feel like, for a brief second, that life is completely pointless. What is the point of going on if you're going to die in an extremely convoluted and sometimes stupid way? What are these stories worth, if they are so basic and rehashed? (And extremely predictable as well.)
The game especially goes lengths to show that the effort of finding hope is fruitless. That no matter what you do, what goodness you try, you will be tormented in the end. That in the end, you will suffer. Yes, we all face death, but good job making everybody's death so pitiful.
In the end, I didn't feel connected to anyone. I just rolled my eyes at the extremely predictable ending and made myself something to eat. I was so bored that by time the game was over, that I was willing to do anything else. Even- gasp- stepping away from my computer.
Now, the whole thing about a curse?... Never addressed. Whether the stories are real or not, never addressed. A more interesting story waits in this bog of self-pity, but the game never allows us to see it. So many people are going to praise this game for its message, for the tragedy, but it's tragedy without a cause. There's no payoff in the end; you walk out of the house feeling like you wasted your time.
The house itself is sometimes interesting, but you're not discovering it. It's one of those handholding games, so you don't even have true exploration on your side. The narrator as well is also just a depressing voice to remind you how sad it is to be in a house with so much death and loneliness, and how sad you're supposed to feel, and how deep its supposed to be.
But What Remains of Edith Finch is only deep if your description of 'deep' involves mindless tragedy and nothing else. (And I mean mindless not as 'in the cosmic scheme' and more mindless in 'the writers clearly didn't give their all for all stories'.)
The game tries to give the illusion that there are highs, but there never are. Nobody dies in a way that makes you say, "Wow, that's amazing! Crazy way to die, but it was almost worth it." Most of the time, people die through stupid mistakes, and mistakes that aren't even worth thinking about.
Then there's the few cases where people are just written out. The missing brother feels less like an example of continued despair and more like they got lazy on writing his story. His room has a little character, but he isn't given any at all. You're in and out pretty quickly and only look at his drawing book for any sort of 'story'.
It doesn't help that, no matter who the narrator is, they are always such a buzzkill to listen to. Everyone's in a constant state of mourning, but unlike Dear Esther, this one keeps trying to up the stakes:
"Oh, the little boy falling off the cliff isn't enough? Here's a drowning baby. SEE, this is why you need to ENJOY THE LITTLE THINGS IN LIFE. SEE?!"
Uh, no. Your moral is unbalanced and your game was almost, just almost as hard to watch as 'Everyone Goes to Rapture'. And in comparison to 'Gone Home', in this game you have much less to pick up and look at. You're in and out of a room in seconds.
Would you like to wander around a large house with only a few interesting items, a bunch of depressing moments, a sappily fake ending, and don't care about feeling unfulfilled? Then watch this game online. I don't recommend a buy. This... Thing isn't worth $20.
It's not scary, it's not whimsical, it's not interesting, it's not thought provoking.
It's just tragic... That this was the game everyone was hyping up. It's just a shame.
