Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

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What Remains of Edith Finch

Platform PS4

What is it? A walking sim where you stumble through and climb around an old house and learn about the fates of various members of your family via conveniently placed journals.

Level of completion The whole thing, obviously. It's, like, three hours long. With that said, I didn't get all the optional trophies, and I probably won't bother going back and getting them.

What I liked

• Some of the vignettes in this game are quite interesting and creative. Two, in particular, come to mind: the comic book-themed presentation of Barbara's story and Lewis' daydreaming at the cannery, which makes very cool use of the twin stick setup of modern controllers to drive home what it was trying to accomplish.
• The music is pretty good throughout. At points, it even plays recognizable songs to good effect, as when Barbara is investigating mysterious noises to the backdrop of the Halloween music, or when baby Gregory's bathtub playtime is set to the Waltz of the Flowers.
• I played with headphones on, and the environmental sound design was well done. Hearing the wind so realistically really helped with the sense of atmosphere and place as I played.
• The game is, in spots, quite pretty. Primarily due to the way certain scenes are realistically lit. I'm a big fan of environmental photography in real life, and I often take pictures when the sun and the shadows form a compelling confluence on the world around them. That only happens a few times here, but the fact that I actually bothered to take a few screenshots (I hate the PS4's screenshot tool, because, unlike the one on the Switch, it's not immediate; you press a button and are taken to a menu) says a lot.
• Using the words from Edith's narration to guide you around the house is interesting.
• For a game filled with so much death, the magical realist presentation goes a long way toward making this not feel terribly dour. It's a balancing act, and sometimes I feel like the game doesn't establish enough of a sense of gravity to make particular deaths feel especially impactful, but I also appreciate that a game that involves horrifically sad stuff like a baby drowning doesn't lean too hard on the realism at times.

What I disliked

• The game's performance on the base PS4 is pretty spotty, with a stuttery framerate throughout (which is bad enough that even I, a person who doesn't usually fixate on this sort of thing, took notice), a very short draw distance with really blatant pop-in (although this becomes much less of an issue when you actually get into the house, as you're mostly confined to small rooms), and some really bad texture quality in spots. I know the PS4 isn't the strongest piece of gaming tech out there, but it shouldn't be struggling to run an indie walking sim, which points to some poor optimization on the part of the developers.
• The controls during certain sequences are REALLY bad. Most notably in Molly Finch's story, where you play as certain animals, and they're all hell to control (especially that stupid octopus).
• Walking sims are often accused of being narratively lazy. Some, like Gone Home, get around this criticism with an innovative focus on indirect environmental storytelling. This game is never so subtle, though, and, more often than not, your participation rarely even feels like it's required. As a big fan of visual novels, I have no issue with games that don't lean very heavily on the gameplay element, but I can't get over the feeling that this would have been better as a film or a series of animated shorts. The game rarely does anything compelling with its interactivity.
• For a game built almost entirely around vignettes about how people die, a disturbingly large portion of these are kind of underwhelming. Some of them are just sort of... random deaths that leave no real impression (Edith, Calvin, Gus, Dawn, and Sam). Some of them feel like they're building up to something, only to end in a totally unsatisfying manner (Molly and Walter).
• That leads into the unexplained elements of the narrative. I get it: things happen to people, and they're not always understood or resolved. But when you have large narrative threads that are just left sort of hanging with no resolution (the strained relationship between Dawn and Edie near the end; Milton's disappearance; etc.), it contributes to a lack of satisfaction about the game's story more broadly.
• And, let's talk about this. For a "story game," this one has a really non-cohesive narrative. There's some sort of broader story about how this family feels cursed, but that's never explored to satisfaction in a more general way. Documents you find around the house continually refers to how the Finches are the most "unlucky" family in America, but, as tragic as some of these vignettes are, they don't give me the impression of a family that's doomed. A handful of people die over the course of more than half a century. That's... normal. A lot of the family drama, as I mentioned, doesn't ever really feel like it's addressed to satisfaction. As far as I can tell, it's about a pregnant woman clambering around a house, recounting how some people died, and then revealing that she died herself. There's no sense of scope to this. While this is the story of a family that spans generations, it doesn't have the complexity, scope, or depth of something like Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Isabele Allende's The House of the Spirits. You might think it unfair to compare a little indie game to masterpieces of world literature, but I expect story games to tell a satisfying story. Soma, for example, while not a fantastic horror game, IS a really interesting science-fiction narrative that's filled with ideas and has a satisfying beginning, middle, and end. I can't say that about this game. This feels totally incomplete: an unrealized grander vision dotted with moments of ingenuity.
• I'll just say this: I don't like that they reduced Edith's role in the story to that of a pregnant woman who dies giving birth. It feels like it cheapens the experiences and role of the character in the story. Also, can we get just ONE narrative about death that doesn't, at some point, dive into the miracle of childbirth? I get it: life/death, beginnings and endings, blah blah blah, but it's so overdone at this point. You know to expect it.

Conclusion What Remains of Edith Finch is an interesting but very unrealized and unsatisfying walking sim that left me feeling like I had experienced the shell of a much better game. I wouldn't warn people off of it, though: it's pretty short, and, more importantly, it has its inspired moments. They don't redeem the experience, but I'm not sorry I played it.

Verdict 5/10

@NintendoByNature Good call. Castlevania: The Adventure is a lot of things, but at least it isn't obtuse. Simon's Quest is obtuse. It's an interesting failure, but it's a failure nonetheless, and absolutely miserable to play today.

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Furi

Platform: Playstation 4

Level of completion: Achieved the best ending and defeated all bosses (including the optional final boss) on Furi difficulty. There are other modes, such as an unlockable difficulty, speedrun mode, etc., but I didn't bother very much with those.

What is it?: A cool indie boss rush. You play as a mysterious man fighting his way out of an incredibly elaborate space prison that is guarded by nine warriors who have dedicated their lives to keeping you from escaping.

Things I liked:

• For an indie title, the presentation is pretty genuinely stunning. You can tell it's not a big budget effort, but the art design is fantastic, and the character models are quite easy on the eyes.
• The music, similarly, is quite impressive, with a number of contributions from exciting new synthwave musicians, including Waveshaper and Carpenter Brut.
• There's a good deal of spoken dialogue in this game, and it's uniformly well-delivered and interestingly written.
• The real dish on what's actually happening in the game isn't handed to you on a platter, and you're able to gradually read between the lines, so to speak, and figure out what's going on as the game progresses. The story itself is quite interesting, even if it does have some presentation issues.
• Controls are razor-tight in this game. They'd have to be.
• The battles in this game are simple enough mechanically, but also exhilarating due to the split-second timing required throughout. You'll learn to expertly switch between twin-stick shooting, melee sword combat, and dashing to evade enemy moves or sneak around them for a devastating surprise attack. And you'll really have to memorize enemy tells and become comfortable with your moveset, because defeat comes upon you like lightning in this game.
• Despite the high skill level of the gameplay, it never felt unfair. You learn the rules early, and its up to you to twist them to your advantage to reign supreme. You'll learn early on about the value of baiting enemy attacks, for example.
• Reloading to the beginning of a battle from the start menu is almost instantaneous, which is good, because, unless you're really, really skilled, you'll be doing this a lot.
• This game also takes inspiration from bullet hell shooters, and every boss' final phase usually involves a sequence where you're desperately having to weave between countless enemy bullets or lasers to survive.

Things I disliked:

• While the story and worldbuilding itself is interesting, the way the story is presented in... underwhelming. I didn't mind the gradual drip of information related to what was going on as you progressed through the game, but the ending is incredibly anti-climactic. The real final boss is even hidden behind an optional ending. What particularly hurts about that is that the penultimate boss (the last mandatory boss encounter, though) is, far and away, the easiest one in the game. While I often struggled mightily to best a lot of the warriors in this game, and even died a number of times against the tutorial boss, I didn't die once against the final required boss encounter in this game. I do think there are thematic reasons for this, as she's very much presented as an amateur and a weakling, but it doesn't take away from the sense of disappointment I felt upon beating her.
• Despite the interesting characters on display here, the one that accompanies you the most never gets a proper character arc, which is unfortunate, because it seemed like the game had been hinting at him playing a much larger role in the story than he ended up adopting.
• The Furier difficulty option that unlocks after you complete the game once. Granted, I don't object to its existence, but the game is already reasonably difficult on the normal difficulty, and, when I tried beating the TUTORIAL BOSS on this higher difficulty level to see see what it was like (I've S-ranked a few of Cuphead's bosses on Expert difficulty and figured it couldn't be any worse than that), I discovered that he was almost more difficult to beat than the late-game bosses on the normal difficulty level. So... I won't be torturing myself like that.
• The dash in this game only executes when you release the button, instead of when you first press it. I get why this is (like attacks, you can charge up your dashes, which is a necessary skill to master if you're going to dodge some utterly brutal attacks in this game), but it doesn't make it less annoying when the dash command always feels like it has the tiniest delay to it.
• For some reason, when you beat a boss and are walking to the next one, the game transitions to fixed camera angles, like in a Resident Evil game. Aesthetically, this is fine, but fixed camera angles without tank controls kind of suck, and sometimes they're positioned in such a way that it's difficult to tell if I'm going the right way or heading back where I came from.

Conclusion: A superior effort all-around that is hampered by a small number of issues related to the narrative presentation and character development. Really impressed with Furi and am eager to play the developer's upcoming RPG now.

Verdict: 8/10