The whole walking simulator genre never really grabbed me. I remember dabbling with Dear Esther and Gone Home and neither held my attention very long. I get why the genre is well regarded, but overall, they never did much for me. I suppose Layers Of Fear could be considered a walking sim, although it also overlaps with horror so maybe that's why I played through that one. I don't know.
As I write this in early 2024, my family is an interesting spot. We moved into a new apartment a few weeks ago. Our house is currently on the market. Our goal is to buy a new house in the town that we've returned to, but alas we have to wait until our house sells and a new one pops up. It's a whole process. But we're happy to finally be back in the town that we always wanted to live in. And we're embracing a new minimalist way of living, since there's three of us and cat crammed into an apartment versus a large house. The reason I bring this up is because the minimalist living has also caused me to go about my gaming in a different way. I'm trying very hard not to spend money on games. It occurs to me that my Playstation Plus subscription gives me access to so many well regarded games that I've never looked into. So I've been going through Metacritic and looking for big hitters that I overlooked and that I don't need to pay extra money to try. Thus, I'm now playing What Remains Of Edith Finch. It's a fairly interesting setup for a game. You play as Edith, a seventeen year old whose mom just died and you're searching through the family home that you've become the beneficiary of. The Finch's are an apparently rich and very eccentric family. And also a family full of tragedy. Basically, the goal of the game is to navigate the Winchester-style home, in search of journals and mementos that would fill in the back story of all of the death and misery that this family has left behind. By the way, major spoilers follow. So you've been warned... MOLLY Molly died when she was ten years old. She left a journal entry behind describing the night that she went to bed with no dinner for punishment. She ends up eating anything edible in her room, and one of those things are some kind of berries that are part of a holiday decoration. I can only imagine that they were poisonous because she goes on to describe a dream that you play out that feels more like a hallucination. She starts out climbing through her bedroom window and becoming a cat, and then an owl, and then a shark and then a monster. The whole thing is surreal to such a crazy extent. But I can't help but feel shaken that it was the dying brain-swells of a child in distress. This game is starting out both absurd and sad. CALVIN Calvin's part is brief but bleak. He's a young boy with a broken leg, swinging on a swing. He ignores his mother's cry for dinner time to swing higher and higher, ultimately launching himself off of the nearby cliff and into the ocean. It's hard to discern if it was that whole thing where young people think that they're invincible, or if this kid actually had suicidal tendencies. BARBARA This is probably the best part of the game. It's probably the chapter that makes this game worth playing. It's inventive and memorable, especially to someone who grew up on slasher films. Barbara was a child actor who appeared in horror movies for two years and then faded into obscurity. Later in her life, her home was invaded and she was brutally murdered. The whole flashback plays out in the form of a comic book presented as an episode of Tales From The Crypt. Oh, and somehow they got the licensing to use the Halloween film score for this chapter. I mean, it's just really a perfect vibe. Creepy and cliched and b-movie shlock. Thumbs up. WALTER Walter witnessed Barbara's death while hiding under a bed. He was a child and lost his mind. And so he lived under the house in a cave for thirty years. The family just pretended he was gone. Every day he listened to tremors from above and ate canned foods. Finally, he decided to break free and get out and see the sun. He emerged on train tracks and stood there staring at the sun. He didn't even see the train that hit him. SAM Sam's story was quick but weird. He took his daughter hunting and caused her to shoot a dear. While trying to snap a picture of their trophy, the dear bucked and knocked him off a cliff. Are you starting to feel like the Finch family is seriously cursed? Me too. GREGORY As a father, I found this chapter really disturbing. You play as Gregory, who is one year old. He's in a bathtub. He's playing with toys. And he drowns while his parents are fighting in the other room. Nothing explicit is shown. Everything is just kind of inferred. And yet it's a total WTF moment. MILTON Milton was an artist, and so his death is flashbacked via a flipbook he made. It's a cool gimmick, especially given the haptic feedback of the Dualsense controller. But it was kind of an anti-climactic scene. I mean, they even just say he "disappeared." So I don't really even know what happened to him. LEWIS This is the most abstract chapter in the game. Lewis had a drug problem, we know that. I liked his "Wonderland Turbo" console which looks like a cross between a PC-Engine and a Playstation. But the chapter... you control him cutting off fish heads at a canary. The right analog stick controls the fish heads. The left stick controls the RPG that is happening in his head. It's really surreal. And it ends with him beheaded in the fantasy world. I don't even know what really happened. Did he die because he like fell asleep at his canary station and beheaded himself? Did he kill himself? Did he overdose? It's very opaque. But it's interesting. I should note that I've decided not to look any of this stuff up. I'm sure somebody's cracked all of the meaning here. But I don't care. This game is like watching a David Lynch movie. Maybe there's an obvious meaning but I don't want to know what it is. I want to just feel and experience the game and take away whatever meaning I take away. EDITH The final chapter is young, pregnant Edith. She's been collecting this story to keep track in a journal to share with her unborn child. And then you wrap up the game by playing as said child exiting her womb. And then you find out that she died, presumably during child birth. So Edith was not the final Finch, but her child was. This was an interesting game, no doubt. Better than most walking sims I've played. One of the few I've finished. I reckon it has low replay value, and I feel like I didn't love it. But I liked it and found it unique and it hit upon multiple feelings for me. It also respected my time, clocking it in at two or three hours which was plenty. I don't think it's for everybody, and I don't even think it was worth all the hype it received. But it was pretty good and I'm happy to have played it without buying it thanks to Playstation Plus. So fine.
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