What Remains of Edith Finch (PS4 / PC)

So here we have the latest critically acclaimed walking simu... hey where are you going?

Yes, the new game from Giant Sparrow (The Unfinished Swan) is, on first glance anyway, broadly similar to many divisive games from recent years. The setup is pure Gone Home (teenage girl arriving home to abandoned house), the slow walking speed pure Everyone Gone to the Rapture (although explains why that is the case here), and the narrative asides are similar to the best moments in Vanishing of Ethan Carter (not to mention the similar naming convention). But in many ways, this is a noteworthy evolution from all of the above.

Walking simulators (with some exceptions) have mostly had the player in a passive role in relation to the drama playing out - you play someone discovering what has happened, but not typically examining it firsthand. Initially, this is how Edith Finch works too - you enter a delightfully gothic building (the fantastical house design is pure Tim Burton) and start discovering hidden passages into locked rooms while Edith narrates. The detail is impeccable - this feels like a genuinely lived in space, full of impressively detailed minutiae (real talk: I've never seen a more accurate video game bathroom due to some extraordinary carpet textures :pac:). But once you get into the rooms, you discover books, letters and other key objects - and that's where the game gets really interesting.

This is effectively a short story collection (I love Sam Barlow's description of it as narrative WarioWare) about a dozen or so family members who have died in a variety of gruesome, mysterious and tragic ways. To tell those stories, Giant Sparrow have come with a variety of inventive, well, 'narrative mini-games' that range from around 2-3 minutes to maybe 15 minutes or so at the longer end. Don't expect any mechanical depth or anything - these are quick hitters with some sort of basic interaction. They all use some sort of novel approach to recount the tragedy in question - one is told through the lens of a camera (the shutter click serving as an in-game edit), for example, while another plays out within the panels of a cheesy horror comic book. Mixed and matched with the more familiar 'environmental storytelling', this creates a quite fresh and interesting dynamic that feels like a real effort to marry the form of the storytelling with the stories being told.

To expand on the most provocative example -
This is a short game - you'll easily see the end credits in a sitting. But it is rich with ideas, and displays a genuine willingness to try and articulate an interactive narrative in a new way. Like any short story collection the 'chapters' here can fluctuate a tad in term of quality and intrigue, but together they form a tableau that is equal parts macabre, darkly comedic, experimental and often emotionally affecting.