What Remains of Edith Finch is free this month from the Epic store. I downloaded it last night and couldn't stop playing until I was done. It's a detailed, polished walking simulator that clocks in at 3 hours, so tightly orchestrated it feels like a genuinely interactive movie.
It centers on Edith, a high schooler and the last surviving child of a family "cursed" by generations of tragedy. After her mother's death, she inherits the cosy yet unsettling manse she grew up in and sets out to uncover the family's secrets. She wants to know why so many Finches died young and why her mother didn't want the stories told.
It's obvious from the outset that something is deeply wrong with the family even as it is clearly a family full of love. The wrongness hovers at the margins of reason. It's reflected in the house, normal at the ground level but an alarming mass of ramshackle additions up top. Surely that would be dangerous, you ask yourself.
Some of the family death vignettes really got under my skin. They're all elaborated in the telling to the point of magic realism and beyond, but when you sit and think about what happened they unravel to mundane parenting failures, one after another after another. The elaborations thereby become part of the problem. But now I'm in danger of spoiling the game's secrets.
Edith Finch maintains a tension between modern gothic mystery and the suggestion of a damaged family that mythologizes its subtly self-destructive currents. It does such a good job of this, though, that when the ending comes it can't close the balance, choosing instead a too-easy way out. Still, that's often just how it goes, with families that aren't quite right.
Get ready to go directly to gross-out because a Garbage Pails Kids-themed Monopoly game is on its way! 2020 marks the 35th anniversary of the delightfully disgusting trading cards that parody the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. According to Bloody Disgusting, Topps has “all sorts of plans in motion for the big celebration,” starting with this […]
Japan’s Game Urara was a magazine about hacking, porn, piracy, mods, and underground gaming culture. It lasted only a few issues in the mid-1990s, but its extraordinary contents distinguished it from all others. A quarter of a century later, it lives on as a set of high-quality scans at the Internet Archive. Senn writes at […]
For years, Keith Ammann has maintained his blog, The Monsters Know What They're Doing, in which he carefully laid out the logical tactics that the monsters of Dungeons and Dragons would use in combat, based on their alignment, stats, and habitats, creating sophisticated advice for Dungeon Masters hoping to move their combat encounters from rote stab-stab-kill affairs into distinctive, memorable strategy-and-tactics affairs that created not just variety and challenges for players, but also depth and verisimilitude. Now, Ammann's work has been collected in the first of two planned volumes: The Monsters Know What They're Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters is one of the most interesting, thoughtful, smart RPG sourcebooks I've ever read.
If you’re looking to build a career in web development, it starts with Javascript. This programming language was there at the golden age of the internet, and it’s still the basis for millions of web pages and apps worldwide. Suffice to say, if you’re a coder who doesn’t know JS yet, you’re not a coder. […]
We’ve all got a perfect website in our minds. In the past, the problem has been the barrier of language – specifically, the computer languages used to create those glittering, animation-filled pages you flock to. Now, Mac users have an alternative. Blocs 3 is a website builder that can provide an easy visual interface for […]
You can do all the pre-workout stretching in the world, but that doesn’t mean you’ll escape stiff muscles and nagging pain after a particularly grueling gym session. When those knots and their accompanying aches and soreness start barking, your options usually boil down to either a deep tissue massage or just grinning and bearing it. […]
