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Thoughts on What Remains of Edith Finch


The UI in What Remains of Edith Finch is very impressive. Its special feature is that the text and environment are integrated together smoothly. There are two main functions of words UI in this game: one is to reflect Edith's inner monologue, the other is to guide the players how to play. The integration of text and environment, closely combines character emotions and stories with guidance, and it enables the content to be clearly presented. If the guidance is not friendly enough, the player will easily lose his goal in the game and not be able to explore further in the game, and the feeling of immersion will be easily broken.

It has some interesting ways of telling a story.

Foreshadow: At the beginning of the game, Edith returns to the old house to explore. After entering the house, all kinds of signs reflect the scene that Edith left the house that night, including messy tables and things that she had not clean up. By explaining the end of the story first, and then reviewing all the story from the beginning, this method can create suspense at the beginning of the game, arouse the players' attention to the content of the story, and then smoothly let the players get into the story.

Perspective-based storytelling: There are two stories about Finch family members that impress me deeply. One was Molly, who ate all kinds of strange things that night because of hunger, then turned into cats, eagles, sharks, pythons to catch all kinds of prey, and finally crawled back to his room (probably eventually ate himself?). Another is that Lewis works in a cannery and imagines another spiritual world in which Lewis thinks he is a greater man than the king. When King Lewis pushes open a door, he enters a real cannery, sees himself working hard from God's perspective, and then goes back over himself. In the fantasy world, in the coronation process, he imagine himself end up both in real life and virtual worlds. There is similar to the feeling that you dream of falling off a cliff in your sleep and suddenly wake up in reality.

At the end of the game, Edith's son laid flowers in front of his mother's tombstone. I didn't know that Edith's journey was also part of the story of death until this scene. The stories of other family members were based on Edith's memory, which makes me think of the dream in dream in Inception and really impresses me with its delicate narrative structure.

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