 Day 25, What Remains of Edith Finch, which came close to winning a few times, but finally clinched it thanks to Liam Knipe and the power of friendship. And in that spirit, I will do my best to pretend like its stunningly poor performance on the world's most powerful video game console isn't really that bad. I've thought a lot about death over the last two years. I think we all have. The reality that more than 850,000 Americans had COVID-19 on their death certificates is overwhelming. At this point, the lucky ones are two degrees of separation. Everyone knows someone who's friend or father or at all died if they aren't the one grieving. Tragic doesn't even begin to describe it. And after that, whoever's left has to pick up the pieces, pack up the boxes, junk the drawers, a life measured in pounds, hold it to a dumpster. What would I leave behind? If I died tomorrow, what would my legacy be? It's kind of a rhetorical question because we both know the answer because I'm performing it and you're watching it. At this point, the story of Alakubusmire exists primarily in the form of these 150-ish YouTube videos, and while there must eventually be a series finale, I doubt anyone would be willing to edit together and post footage of my death to this platform. And it's even less likely that anyone would make a critically acclaimed video game out of it. But it's interesting to know that someone could. I know that the titular finches aren't real and that their deaths as depicted in what remains of Edith Finch are not gamifying specific people's final moments. But certainly, people had those experiences, drowning in a bath tub, being struck by a train, even being crushed by a tent in a windstorm. All of those have definitely happened and definitely resulted in real fatalities. And now I have played through those experiences. Sure, I've been hit by trains and games before, but then I just go and restart. It was punishment for a wrong move and not the whole dang point. And it may look pretty similar, but it sure feels different. What remains of Edith Finch is a first-person exploration game, a so-called walking simulator scene from Edith's perspective, as she learns about the tragedy of her family tree, one so plagued with misfortune that they finished the graveyard before they did the actual house Edith grew up in. Then again, a house like theirs doesn't just go up overnight or even in weeks or months, it's years in the making, with strange OSHA-defying additions as members of the family grew further apart and needed more space, but refused to leave the property. Edith was pulled away from the house suddenly at the age of 11, but as the game starts, she has come back six years later because her mom, now deceased, left her a key. She doesn't know much about what happened that night or really in the years prior what happened to her family members, what secrets her mom had kept. She had to find out. The house seems to have been untouched since she left, though in a fantastical kind of way. The old food looks like it's been out maybe a few days. The inevitable decay seems to have stopped around the same time the power did. Eventually, you, as she learned that the key opens the first of many secret passageways, which bring you through the most conveniently linear house layout that has maybe ever existed. You can go from room to room, filling in the family tree by reliving each person's last moments, as exposed by some piece of writing or art that reflects that time. You may wonder how, exactly, someone was able to journal their death in real time, but don't do that. You're a loser if you do that. And like, this is pretty typical walking simulator stuff, but what distinguishes Edith Finch from others in its genre is the way in which the game changes to reflect each segment. The first history is as fantastical as the house, and it serves as an excellent introduction to the way the game will shift beneath your feet. Not even 15 minutes in, your first person human exploration becomes first person catwalking, becomes first person owl flying, becomes third then first person shark falling, then swimming, becomes first person tentacle monstering. And once all that's over, you don't do any of it again. Each story has some unique mechanic that makes it feel special, that sits in your memory. And when I say Lewis's story, I guarantee you every single person who has played this game will flash back to one of the most genuinely fascinating sequences I have ever seen in a game ever. And it's not like the rest of them are bad, they're pretty uniformly fantastic, but Lewis's is something else. It's also deeply sad, though not as much as it could be. Whether the family is literally cursed or not, it's not hard to understand why they would feel like they were, nor is it hard to understand why Edith's mother didn't want her to know what was actually going on, where people actually went when she suddenly didn't see them anymore. It's a lot for someone to even acknowledge, let alone process. And these mini-games are a way to alternately process and avoid it, an abstraction of the bleak realities that let you focus on the mechanic and the storytelling so that when Edith puts their name in her diary afterwards, you don't have to think about how fucked up some of these stories are. You can, and you probably will for a few minutes, but pretty soon you'll have found another story to experience. And that keeps the game from being just like completely overwhelming. It is an incredibly fine balancing act that Giant Sparrow had to do here, and the performance deserves a standing ovation, except for the performance of said performance. The elephant in the room is that I had a pretty bad time having such a good time. When I first played what remains of Edith Finch shortly after it hit Xbox Game Pass just over a year ago, it was kind of horrified to find that the Xbox One X version was basically a slideshow. After 20 minutes, I just gave up. I downloaded it again when I got my Series X later in the year, excited that I might finally be able to play the thing properly, but no. It somehow still had an unstable frame rate. And that was that. I resigned myself to just never finishing it until it was selected for me, and had to deal with the technical problems. Fortunately, a walking simulator can get away with subpar performance in that the frame rate issues didn't inhibit my ability to progress the game, but it certainly diminished the effectiveness of what I was seeing. And that sucks, because I know that if I had played it on another platform, I would have had a better time. Even in this state, it's the best game of its type that I've played. In the superlatives, I might have bestowed upon it if it were able to run at just 30 frames per second on a machine with 12 teraflops of graphics performance. 8.3 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching and thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, Hammering Marco, Kat Saracota, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I'm the Sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindyce, Andrew Madison Design, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, that's great. If not, oh well, if you want to see more, there's still a few more days to suggest things. We're getting real close to the end now. Real close. Pretty wild. Bye!