What Remains of Ludonarrative in ‘Edith Finch’
It’s easy to accuse narratively driven games of “walking simulator” status, meaning that a game lacks true challenge or “play” in the traditional sense. What Remains of Edith Finch has faced that criticism due to its ambience, its large but generally absent character cast, and open ended threads of obscured meaning. At the same time, people like myself struggle for the vocabulary to describe how beautiful and emotional the stories within this game are for the player. The cryptic and unwinding tale of Edith Finch harmonizes some unforgettably consonant ludonarrative moments that blew me away in my playthrough, and I’d like to outline a few of them here.
Calvin: Over the Cliff
Calvin’s story mirrors that of his brother Sam, who he shared a room with his entire life. But we, the player, are transported into a swingset sequence. This swingset overlooks a beautiful west coast cliff as the setting sun glistens along the rippling ocean. You quickly realize that, in order to swing, you have to orchestrate the necessary leg movements that give you momentum on a swing. It’s almost like you are a kid again, trying to figure out how to swing higher and higher.
The ludonarrative success of this swinging sequence with Calvin began with the fact that each joystick corresponded to a leg: left and right. Like in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, where each joystick represented an individual character, this swingset sequence with Calvin takes advantage of how controls can actually represent reality better than mere visuals and thereby immerse a player more deeply via mere mechanics. In other words, the simple gesture of mapping one joystick to a leg each, and requiring the player to harmonize those movements – however simple – gestures towards the potential that videogames have to bring emotional moments to life.
A small aside: As Calvin’s swinging velocity accelerates, so too does his narration. That is, he swings higher, and his conclusions about the world escalate in intensity and exaggeration. Calvin is exasperated when he concludes what he wants to truly remember about his brother, Sam. This beautiful sunset, this perfect swingset, aren’t enough to ground Calvin to the morbid and hollow reality of loss that must, to a child, feel like a treadmill by this point. The angles in this scene sharpen and dramatize, leading to a situation in which Calvin in fact loops his swing around the tree via momentum. This loop ends up vaulting Calvin out into the craggy sea hundreds of feet below – to his death. The scene ends: “The day he made up his mind to fly… he did.”
Gregory: Down the Drain
Gregory is an infant in the Finch family who is presented to us through the first person perspective in a bathtub. Gregory has rubber duckies and other toys to keep him company. We soon gain control of a toy frog, one that seems somewhat sentient, who becomes the psychic avatar for Gregory’s scene. These rubber duckies come to life, and you have to control the frog in order to escape the tub. This frog ends up tumbling a toy whale (also sentient) into the water, allowing a platform for easier jumping. But when the whale tumbles into the water, an alphabet of dialogue begins swirling around its body.
This whale bounces your frog up onto a bottle of soap, which falls into the water, causing bubbles to form on the tub’s surface. Gregory’s mother then reattends the bath scene – heretofore she has been on the phone – and quickly drains the tub before disappearing again. These letters go away as you overhear Gregory’s mother say that she doesn’t want you to hear the contents of her call. As she says this, Gregory’s mom shuts the glass door to the tub and leaves the room, allowing you to control the frog once more.
The frog hops its way up to the spigot of the bathtub and turns it on full blast, refilling the tub to the overflowing point – and thereby drowning Gregory, an infant who can’t swim. Gregory’s story is almost entirely told through mechanics, and isn’t told at all through language.
Gus: Before the Storm
Gus’ chapter is short and simple, but ludonarratively complex enough to reiterate here. His scene begins with two hands and a spool attached to a kite, flying around over a celebration on the beach below. This beach is beautiful and multi-surfaced. Your kite traverses the quiet grey sky to piece together dialogue and narration. The mechanics of how the kite and language interact are better seen than described, but I was instantly struck with the feeling that there was indeed something to be said about the relationship between mechanics and storytelling.
The ludonarrative in Gus’ scene ends up scaring off the attendees as a vicious storm rolls in. The harsh winds batter the kite, which becomes a surrogate of the storm, like a tornado that vacuums up all the tables and chairs from the party below – instead of simple letters and language. The kite becomes itself a kind of destructive force. This ending bleeds into the supernatural realm as the tent becomes some kind of wind ghost – but I will leave that final speculation up to the reader to determine for themselves. The border between magic and realism in Edith Finch isn’t at all times very clear.
Lewis: Death by Monotony
Lewis didn’t catch me at first as the most ludonarratively complex of all the characters in Edith Finch, but I immediately replayed his story – and his story alone – upon completing my playthrough. Lewis is introduced to us in a factory, recovering from substance abuse. One joystick controls his right hand, grabbing dead fish, decapitating them, and then adding them to an assembly line. This process is repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated until Lewis drives himself crazy.
Eventually, your left joystick becomes relevant to the scene. A billowing black cloud emerges in Lewis’ imagination, revealing a character that you end up controlling with your mind as you continue to behead the fish. This character sprite traces a path similar to the archetype of Odysseus or the hero’s journey, archetypally speaking, that is only ever interrupted by moments of pure gameplay. These moments of gameplay present pure ludonarrative brilliance: the sprite encounters a fish that, in real life, Lewis needs to behead before the gate can be passed. The character becomes itself a fantasy.
Lewis both embraces and withers from the dredgeries of routine, living in a manufactured and endlessly grinding existence. He dreams up this character sprite as a coping mechanism for monotony. It is soul crushing to imagine the life of Lewis, chopping one fish head off after another. I felt ill while playing his part, but that feeling only strengthens the idea that Lewis’ mental collapse – as per his psychologist in a letter found in the game – is warranted, and, more importantly, human.
There are also fun moments of ludonarrative like the sailing journey to the city of “Lewistopia.” You are presented with a boat as your new avatar for Lewis’ imaginary journey, where multiple forks in the river become choice based moments for you to build your own imaginary story. The choices are simple, but the fact that there are choices at all enhances this scene to make it memorable beyond the scope of Lewis’ individual story.
As Lewis enters his kingdom, his psychologist reveals some telling narration: “for someone who’d never known success in the real world,” it was overwhelming for Lewis. “My imagination is as real as my body,” he told the psychologist. There is an undeniable hallucinatory juxtaposition between this real-time factory from hell and this imaginary fantasy palace with musical celebration and royalty. The scene culminates with your character leaving on a conveyor belt from the factory, arriving at a regal celebration to a crowning ceremony for you. You enter the throne room triumphantly, lead your way up to the top, and bow your head to receive the crown – only for the screen to go black. You have been decapitated. Like fish.
The secrets of Edith Finch aren’t easily unravelled, and there are undoubtedly more stories for the walls of the Finch household to tell. These small stories illustrate the brilliant complexity with which Edith Finch blends and confuses the boundaries between how stories are told and how players receive stories. More importantly, they use gameplay to innovate how stories can be told.
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