SCRAPS AND SCRIBBLES
Viewing entries tagged
culture
Studio Albertine is taking part in the Mercer Island Artwalk this week on Friday, March 6, from 5-8 PM.
I will be hosting a pop-up in support of local artist Rachel Yo’s feature, and bringing framed giclée art prints (including ones formerly installed at Sammamish City Hall), art cards, matted prints, & Water’s Edge.
See the event page for a list of participating locations and featured artists.
I’m not a gamer by any measure of the word—I can’t aim in a first-person-shooter to save my life, and I regularly run my character into walls in any given genre—but I would enthusiastically become one for a particular type of gaming experience.
Specifically, I’d like to relive journeys like What Remains of Edith Finch, released in 2017 by Annapurna Interactive, over and over again. My partner and I bought this game for Xbox on the Microsoft store at the beginning of spring pandemic quarantine, figuring that we had so much time on our hands, we could take it slow and puzzle through the story at a leisurely pace. Instead, we finished it in two nights. The below is why.
Edith Finch unfolds like a drama miniseries or episodic novel, following the titular young woman to Washington’s San Juan Islands years after an incident of familial trauma as-yet unrevealed. We learn that Edith’s mother is gone, and Edith has journeyed back to her family’s ancestral home, a sprawling, rickety, Tim Burton-esque dwelling that has swelled over the centuries to tower over a stretch of rugged coastline. The original structure was ferried across the ocean by historical patriarch Odin Finch, who drowned in the effort and became the first ancestor to be interred in the family graveyard in the shadow of the growing house—thus the Norway-transplanted Finches begin their Washingtonian genealogy with death.
Edith carries nothing with her but a key and a journal, and via first-person exploration of the richly appointed and now abandoned Finch house environment, we help her fill in the blanks of her family tree.
The atmospheric great room of the sprawling Finch house
Generational tragedy clings to the family home like dust. We learn right off the bat that the Finches believe themselves cursed since before Odin, each member bound to perish in ways ranging from the ordinary to the supernatural, sometimes by accident and sometimes by their own hand or a stranger’s. Edith’s grandmother has sealed and memorialized each room like shrines to each vanished family member, and vanished herself as well. As Edith, we unseal these rooms and towers to open music boxes, read diaries, and peer at photos…all the while piecing together the mystery of why she and her mother abruptly fled the house years ago, as well as the more distant mystery of each Finch’s untimely death.
There are lots of opportunities for interaction with the environment
Months later, I still think about this gaming experience regularly. It’s like no other game I’ve read about or attempted before. It lingers for a few reasons, chief among which is the game’s insanely high production value. A wealth of personal details fills each room, from a grandmother’s unfinished painting to local takeout menus to tins upon tins of fish brought home by a brother who worked, for a time, at a nearby cannery. Not a single detail is extraneous—it all serves to gently elegize the Finches who lived and died before Edith, their presences still keenly felt in their eerily preserved rooms.
Just as the strange, sad twists of each Finch demise keep us guessing from unlocked room to unlocked room, the gameplay also keeps us on our toes. No two scenes are alike, and at each transition, there is a period of trial and adjustment while we figure out what exactly the newly unfolding story is asking of us. (SPOILERS FOLLOW) In “reliving” each death, we get to creep along branches as a hungry cat, guide an aunt through a comic book thriller, fly a kite in a storm, and find our way out of a nuclear bunker, among other things, experiencing a staggering variety of gameplay and storytelling modes that are all still elegantly and coherently linked. What’s more, it’s worth noting that in Edith Finch we do not merely decode the details of an untimely Finch death; we literally push the buttons that precipitate each demise, swinging a child off a cliff and putting a man in the path of industrial chopping machinery. (SPOILERS END)
But why so much death? Isn’t Edith Finch then just a gratuitously and exhaustingly macabre exercise in tumbling from sad story to sad story at breakneck speed? Not at all—and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say I probably won’t grasp the full extent of the game’s poetry of pain, acceptance, grief and trauma for years to come.
Each episode is deeply moving and rendered with such loving sensitivity and dreamlike serenity, as though in the process of dying, each family member finds a kind of peace and wonder in the way they are leaving the world. Often the Finches are killed by the things they love doing, or by unexpected, freak consequences of a decision they stood steadfastly behind. In other words, each manner of death embodies the essence of the person who passed, as much as the contents of their memorial bedroom do. As a result, the arc of each episode peaks with a player realization of “oh, of course this is how it happens, of course this is how it had to happen”—a clever audience replication of the sense of fatedness that the Finches feel about their bloodline, as well as an affirmation of the deceased’s unique personhood.
We (and Edith) aren’t exploring the house to solve the problem of the Finches, exactly, but to process, understand and accept the cyclical, sprawling tragedy endured by the family. It sounds grim…but in real life, isn’t that often all we can do when faced with private heartbreak?
Throwin’ it back to a Blenheim Palace visit in 2013.
Everything was much better before The War
You use four different nicknames daily for "Charles," and they're all for the same guy
Someone you know would lay down their life for a cold, inconvenient, and uncomfortable middle-of-nowhere house
Your local spunky unmarried 30-something woman looks like Emma Thompson
Your friend has confided in you that he can't possibly leave his cheating spouse, he’s an upstanding Englishman!
You’ve experienced extreme drama surrounding unsent or misinterpreted letters
Oxford, 2013.
Nanny still lives in the attic 47 years later and will show off your baby photos if you ask
You have a vague perception of Catholics as being kinda weird
Someone is the black sheep of your family solely because they married the wrong person
At one point you have regaled a friend with everything you know about a particular man. But you are definitely not in love with him, oh no. You think about him 24/7 but you are not in love with him and have never been. Also you have no other memories from the past decade that don't involve this man that you are absolutely not in love with
Papa says England must be falling because women have jobs and opinions now
You’re reliably very, very surprised when you run into a neighbor-slash-relative...in your tiny town...at a family event! Small world
Your family friend Edmund is a commoner, but he's allowed to party on our veranda because man, can he write
A symbolic Big Tree grows on the grounds of your family home
They're tearing down your ancient house to build flats, what a pity
It's been a while since you’ve heard from your distant relative in India or the Levant
You’re certain the butler can't feel love, he exists just to butler
People who didn’t go to Oxford don't count
Is your nickname derisive or affectionate? You genuinely do not know
Mama is lying down on account of her nerves and migraines; please don't make noise in the corridors
You’ve considered running away to Switzerland to ride out a wave of drama and gossip in style
You know cousin Victoria is capital-R Rebelling, because she wants to marry an American
There's a new baby in the family but you never see it and rarely mention its name
