Annapurna's First Video Game Plays Like a Short-Story Collection

In fact, the game's premise and structure may remind players most of two things, neither of which is Borges: Gone Home, the other recent narrative-based game in which players explored a deserted family home in the Pacific Northwest, and The Gashlycrumb Tinies, Edward Gorey's macabre little alphabet book about children coming to bad ends. The player, as Edith, explores the Finch home, a sprawling Winchester Mystery House in which the rooms were sealed off over the years as members of the extraordinarily unlucky family died. Secret passages lead into the long-preserved rooms, where Edith finds documents that tell her more about her past. So far, this is just like Gone Home, which is itself just like any number of epistolary novels, telling its story through letters, newspaper clippings, divorce agreements, diaries, and the like. But while Gone Home simply let players read the documents, each discovery in What Remains of Edith Finch launches a unique level set inside the head of a member of the Finch family, with both aesthetic and gameplay elements that are colored by that person's perceptions, making each into a sort of first-person unreliable narrator.