Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to the world of what remains of Edith Finch. What happens when you combine a game studio riding the success of their first major release, the daughter of the fourth richest person in the world, and the success of a well-placed bet in Catherine Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty?
Speaker: Find out as we delve into the twisted branches of the Finch family tree and journey into the unorthodox home of the Finches. Listeners are encouraged to look at the family tree included in the episode description in an effort to maintain audio and visual consistency throughout the episode.
Speaker: If you do not do this, that is okay too. These are very low stakes. If you find yourself confused, know that absurdity is par for the course on this particular journey. The following contains flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks.
Speaker: This is a game where birds become sharks, which become creatures of unimaginable darkness. This is a game where Rube Goldberg machines, locks within keys and keys within keys make up most of your discovery.
Speaker: So if you find yourself wrestling with the truth and your understanding of it, know that that's just par for the course on this particular journey. Thanks for stopping by, and we'll catch you at the end.
Speaker: Edith Finch. Edith Finch. Now, this is a show or show a game that I've been telling you to play for a few months now, and I'm glad you finally got around to it. It was a lot of different things to me.
Speaker: It's it's a very nice, genuine story. So the game itself. At the end of the journey. Very, very compelling.
Speaker: I enjoyed it from beginning, ah from about midway to end. The beginning itself is pretty good. It's, well, let's talk about it. So this is a game short enough that you can, you and I can almost go through it bit by bit and literally take it in.
Speaker: So the first thing you do is you start off, you're this woman holding a journal and you are departing on a boat. And where you arrive is this,
Speaker: uh almost sort of like this is this island that uh is separate from most of society it's deep you you are approaching this house deep in the jungle more and more revealing text shows up that is informing you that uh you any further there's something that we really ought to do what's that spoiler warning
Speaker: Spoiler warning for sure. So the first thing that happens if you're me is you look down and there's already more storytelling going on in the ability to see your character than you get most of the time out of these first person narrative experiences.
Speaker: um It's very clear that this this woman is pregnant. Your character is speaking wistfully. She's journaling to her her baby.
Speaker: This much is is revealed very quickly and was revealed even, you know, just two seconds later is that this is a family that she's welcoming her child into that has been plagued by trauma.
Speaker: ah The first thing that happens is before we even approach the house, we you know go in basically through the muddy backyard. And we are we see a bunch of newspapers describing if you've made missing a child.
Speaker: a missing child we'll talk about later. But it's our first little bit into the finish. I don't know. how How would you describe the family overall? Eccentric. Eccentric.
Speaker: I would say that they're eccentric. There's something to be said for depiction of mental health issues. ah But ah at this point, it's the best description is they're a little eccentric. They're a little odd.
Speaker: Okay, let's start there. That's a very neutral term, and let's get less neutral. So first off, it's brought to you by Annapurna Games. Annapurna Games, for those of you that don't know, is funded by, I believe it is Morgan Ellison, sorry, Megan Ellison. She's a daughter of Larry Ellison, who is the fourth richest person in the world.
Speaker: She went to school. She attended film school. She went to film school, and she obviously had a lot of money to make a lot of her dreams come true. And her and her company, Annapurna Productions, Annapurna Interactive, have given us a lot of really, really, really phenomenal games.
Speaker: um I don't want to get the and don't get to ahead of ourselves, but right off the bat, Telling Lies. ah Kentucky Route Zero, my personal favorite from what I'm looking at, Outer Wilds. ah What Tom by Keita Takahashi straight neon white.
Speaker: um A plethora of different genres. a A it's a fairly good place to be supported by if you are an independent and you want to put get ah your your small, the creative and profound idea just injected with cash flow to make whatever you wanted. So after.
Speaker: ah The Unfinished Swan, Giant Sparrow, was either approached by or approached Annapurna. And Annapurna was after the success of, I think, Zero Dark Thirty.
Speaker: i don't know if anybody remembered that film. Right around that time, maybe a couple years later, right when they were making... um After Foxcatcher, Her, American Hustle, The Master, Lawless, ah all these movies that Annapurna was responsible for, they wanted to break into the video game sphere. and So they took the narrative world created by Ian Dallas with his company, Giant Sparrow. The people that made this game, Giant Sparrow,
Speaker: They had this really good monochromatic near minimalist, i might you might say, story-driven game called The Unfinished Swan. It is about a boy who has two actions.
Speaker: He can move, sorry, three. He can move, he can jump, and he can throw paintball. These paintballs inform the environment. And what it was was a really creative way to only do about you know, three things um to get you the most out of your minimalist environment.
Speaker: I played in like 2012, I think. I just saw on their thing 2020, but on the on the giant sparrow side, it says 2012. So, OK. Oh, unfinished swan came out on the PS3 before that.
Speaker: Maybe the the PS Anna Perner. So the only reason I know it's 2012 is I played in the unfinished swan in high school. Um, I was very, you know, ah back when I was sort of in my, you you know, video games or art phase and I was looking for, I guess, any game I could point to as an attack dog to anybody that might, you know,
Speaker: defer from that ah that that that opinion. The Unfinished Swan was just something I looked at and I was like, oh my gosh, I could give this to my grandma. I don't really have any grandmothers. I can give this to grandma and she could actually just kind of lose herself.
Speaker: um I would recommend anybody play it. It's as simple as Pac-Man. ah If you have, you know, a spatial awareness, if you can tell depth, you know you can play this game. ah But what it was was it was the best of use of their tools.
Speaker: So Unreal Engine 4, what it gave us was it was detailed enough in its environments and it was simple enough in its approach that you could make books when and actually put text in them.
Speaker: You can have handwriting up here and it have different legibilities, not just font, but um i personality. Personality. personality, absolutely.
Speaker: And the cool thing is we can edit that like you had it right off the bat. But the the what's this cannot be understated because what's happening is we have the slowest moving character of all time.
Speaker: As she wanders her way through this house, all of the traumatic situations are... It looks like a bomb went off and everybody just had to leave because you have like like milk jugs and food is still on the table.
Speaker: You have... um doors ah boarded up. You have like ah books falling over. It's a very lived in house and it's not been kept up at all. Added on to it's been it's you look at this house from you You first look at this house and it looks absolutely absurd. It looks like a tree house on a tree house on a tree house.
Speaker: A hat on a hat on a hat, if you will. And it's I would even say it it sends a narrative shiver down the spine in that it it seems like. Like it's a it's been it's a house that's been compromised so many times and transformed in it. It's very sad.
Speaker: What's even crazier is the whole time in this game they are. There's this far off in the ocean. There is an actual house with a ah what do you call it?
Speaker: Yes, there's this red light coming off of a buoy and it didn't know or maybe it's not a buoy, but it acts as almost a buoy. It's a demarcation device, but it's where the original Finch house was. And this original Finch house, it's becon beacon. Yes, thank you.
Speaker: It's just taunting you this whole time. And that is an amazing game device. The first thing you want to do when you're creating a game after you've tutorialized but as a level designer, you want to show people something they can aspire interact with, but can't interact with yet. I mean, this is Doom e one m one I'm giving you just all the things that you can see, but you can't get quite yet.
Speaker: But the first so you you come into this house. Right. The all the houses are all the doors are literally boarded up with like super glue in the only way to.
Speaker: to actually approach any of these rooms is to go through almost like a Rube Goldberg machine like process of of like trap doors and ah pulleys and you know ah puzzles none of these are are in and of themselves very difficult to solve But they are they do obstruct you and they do give you maybe a minor one or two minutes to contemplate the story you just absorbed.
Speaker: The first story that we know we're going hear about is at the very bottom. One of the very first. So the the game's pause menu is actually very intricate. it It's a family tree. So the family tree of Edith Finch.
Speaker: First level that we're going to start off with is Molly. Now she's 1937 to 1947. So already off the bat, when we click on her, we know that she has only lived 10 years.
Speaker: Do you remember? What do you i'm going to ask? This is the way we're going to do this, if you don't mind. I have played this very recently. This is very um fresh in the heart, but not as fresh in the mind of Ali.
Speaker: So Ali, I want to hear your emotional. remember like Remind us what it was like to go through this. So for me, it was really interesting because I was going through and i was, I went through it with the mindset of, okay, I'm just gonna play this game. And it seems like all I'm doing is walking, which was, you know, fine. That's the kind of experience I was looking for at that moment.
Speaker: um What was really fascinating to me was the, the change into the, the different characters and experiencing what really ends up being all of their last moments in and very intricate ah but well well designed death scenes.
Speaker: Yeah, the it's it's it's important that you said that it is their last moment that we play as on each of these characters. So when i'm When I'm playing through it, I'm just like, okay, so this is this is really, really sad. um And not to get too far ahead, but as I got to the end and I realized what story it was trying to tell, while all of this stuff is sad, there's this really, I'm going to say empowering message of hope at the end.
Speaker: And it's very kind of, it's it's contradictive to the rest of the story, but then again, hope is contradictive to the everyday life. So... Well, one thing that is for sure is that you will die and I will die and everybody that's going to listen to this will die.
Speaker: ah The question isn't how we're going to die or it's it's how are we going to live? Edmund Vance Cook. So little so history. I usually used to, in my high school, ah run a poetry club.
Speaker: It was something I'm very proud of. But it's ah one of my favorite poems I ever shared was How Did You Die and by Edmund Vance Cook. um I'd encourage you to look it up. It's something we'll probably put in the description of this episode.
Speaker: But ah it's basically the thematically the message of this game. And we'll we'll talk about that little bit later. um want to talk about Molly. Do you remember Molly's level?
Speaker: Molly was, she was a kid. She's a 10 year old little girl who's hungry. Yeah. She got a munchies. And then she eats toothpaste and berries.
Speaker: She eats toothpaste sheets, berries, her mom and her had a fight and she got sent to bed without any sort of dinner. So she's eating everything. And then ah i can only imagine because this is the game. had i couldn't tell if it was being absurd in a an over the top self-indulgent kind of way, because the way that this all happens is you go from being a Molly, the little girl, her, she's, you know kid height, child height.
Speaker: ah She approaches the window. She, she's a canary and she turns into a cat. And then she keeps just going from tree branch to tree branch. And it's just this nice little like platforming segment.
Speaker: And you ah keep just hunting this bird and then you get the bird and then you turn into a bird yourself, a hawk. And then you start hunting little bunnies and then from a hawk to a shark.
Speaker: And this is like my fiance was watching this with me, watching me play. And she couldn't believe. how crazy it was to just see the shark just falling into the snow.
Speaker: And then you just sort of like, you know, back and forth yourself into the ocean. And ah really it's really absurd in a way that like, it's very clear, actually, that you're viewing this from the perspective of somebody who's, I mean, probably like undergoing some sort of poisoning or something.
Speaker: ah so it's ah Obviously, it's very deluded if we're to take this first person narrative experience. It's hallucinations through the mind of a child. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: You might have to have that suspension of disbelief as ah of a child. But Molly goes from being a shark capturing, you know, her little shark prey. And then she becomes like this being of darkness, which is actually like really, really intense. And she's like honest on a on a sea boat on a boat in the sea. And she is taken over this yeah like basically almost hit man meets Octodad style of just taking these guys out one by one by one
Speaker: And ah then this Slytherin snake like little dark thing just ah goes under Molly's bed and the story ends.
Speaker: And you were relieved from the story by, you know, ah finishing reading her her note that was left in Molly's room and either just looks around and.
Speaker: She finds something down in the cupboard and she pulls it and then a new door you know opens up. And then from there... It is kind of important to note um the bedrooms themselves are really interesting.
Speaker: Exactly. That's something you that the Unreal Engine afforded these guys. They could do these highly, highly detailed... like A room could tell a story. We're not just... you know, four polygons of, you know, a wallpaper of grass.
Speaker: That's not what this is anymore. the We are technologically afforded all this level of detail. it's It seems like every single room ah really told you who that person was, whether it be Molly or the Mole Man or, ah you know, any of them.
Speaker: Very, very much what the what that character's focus is. Even Edie Sr.'s room.
Speaker: seeing how these rooms interconnect is actually very, very fascinating. Um, some, because like I said, all the all the rooms, whenever i guess the children or whomever who, when, whenever someone passed away in the Finch household, their room got preserved, almost fossilized and, uh, almost petrified basically.
Speaker: Boarded up, sealed with whatever that super glue looking stuff was. Exactly. Right. So, Molly's room was just ah heads of toe and pink little frilly 1940s curtains, pink everything. She had a nice little chalkboard, ah you know, a pink dresser adorned with, you know, a cloth with her name on it, as is typical in the Finch household.
Speaker: She had a little pony, a big fancy pink chair, just a 10 year old's little dream. And this is all very important because we're talking about characterizing something through a tiny, intricate little setting.
Speaker: which Edith Finch really was one of the first people to do the first games to do that in a narrative experience. um When I think about like everybody's gone to the rapture or even things like get even, which is basically a first person narrative experience, even though it's got a little bit of gunplay.
Speaker: ah I don't think anything has ever touched. the environmentally denseness that this game offers. They really had a challenge that ah I think they rose to, and that is, for all intents and purposes, the only surviving member of the family at the at that time was Edith herself.
Speaker: So when you when you take that into consideration, you have to make the rooms in a way that tells everything about who these characters are when these characters aren't actually going to be there to tell you themselves.
Speaker: And all you have narratively is their last will and testament. And i think the, I think they rose to that challenge because I had, you know, coming out of Molly's room, I had no, no question as to who she was. And, uh, that goes for all of the other characters, the movie star, the, the, the comic book one.
Speaker: Yeah. So yeah, let's, let's talk about some of those. So the next one after Molly is Barbara. That's uh, Flight of the Conchords reference. um It's Barbara, who was a 16. OK, so born 1944, died 1960.
Speaker: And as we find out, she was. She was murdered. you know Well, they're all murdered by life. How did she live? She's the movie star.
Speaker: was like, she's the comic book one. Mm hmm. Cell shaded. Hers was depicted in an almost a comic book kind of way, which was kind of interesting. But hers was the the boyfriend murdered her.
Speaker: Huge success. And actually leading up to and through the rest of the game, you see like her movie posters and stuff everywhere. in like the the comic book that you play as also like a fanaticizes it and it turns her ah her murder into this multi level conspiracy thing where like every horror monster in the universe that she existed in is also like out to get her.
Speaker: um It was basically like playing a little bit of an episode of Scream is like playing an episode of Scream as done by like the cel-shaded graphics of 13. I remember 13. That was a neat one. It was a neat little multiplayer. what my first multiplayer games.
Speaker: But Calvin was under the bed the whole time. Calvin, boy, he was 11 years old when he passed, unfortunately. He saw the whole thing from the bed.
Speaker: And I'm trying to remember which one Calvin was. Was Calvin the swing? Calvin was the swing. Calvin was the swing. So Calvin... Did what every one of us wanted to do. He actually got there.
Speaker: He God darn did it. All right. He went all the way around the swing set and all it cost him was everything. He went all around ah all the way around the swing set and then just kept going.
Speaker: And then he just momentum does he had never stopped speedy thing never never met another object. So a homeboy ah swinging. And what's really cool is like you go into Calvin's room from ah Molly, you went from Molly to Barbara's room and Barbara to Calvin's.
Speaker: All these rooms again, Rube Goldberg style separated from each other through just impossible contraptions that don't we don't need to go into weird tunnels or toy boxes and Yeah, i think through toy boxes and secret compartments, all of these things. But Calvin is swinging on the swing set. And this is what's really cool is it's almost it's almost like worry aware in that the game shows you what it is. It doesn't tell you how to play it, but you realize, oh, like I'm swinging. I'm going back and forth like I'm picking up momentum.
Speaker: It's very intuitive and it's actually very thoughtfully designed. Every one of these stories differs from the story before it and the story ahead of it. It's this like nice anthology style game where it almost feels like there was like every develop every person on this team was able to take like one specific story, hyper personalize it.
Speaker: um I wouldn't be surprised if that's how this game was developed, but I guess. and And it also ah visually, they're all very, very distinct as well. Oh, yeah. So Calvin and Sam's room were two two halves of the same room.
Speaker: I think they were twins, which is, you know, something sad to be said about that. ah So Calvin was 11 old. on a swing set he god darn does it he eats himself off the cliff but you know what he touched space he touched god for a second and then he met him and uh these these two brothers couldn't be any uh any more different by the way yeah you know ah do you How much do you remember about Sam?
Speaker: Sam got to live 43 years. He was an outdoors room. First off, when I say these are two sides of the same room, know that I'm not being metaphorical.
Speaker: ah There's literally 1970s velvet rope uh splitting the room in a half where it's calvin's very you know childlike kitty toy command center space themed calvin like space i don't know if we mentioned that sam or sorry or sam's was thrown with calvin and sam is this hunter whom he meets his demise uh do you remember how the story is revealed on sam's it's through photographs on this one instead of store instead of written
Speaker: It's ah you are the you are the daughter taking pictures of the hunting trip and then the the not so dead deer. it's It's so it's almost sweet that whole scene because, you know, the the him and the daughter are going hunting, ah taking pictures.
Speaker: It's is this kind of nice story of like a father and daughter outing the camping trip. And then it very clearly becomes about ah how to gun murder a bunch of deer.
Speaker: So the daughter is very obviously not cool with that. And the dad's just like, hold up. It's hold up. It's, it's, uh, antlers or whatever. And daughter's like, no. And he's like, okay, I'll set it on a timer go up to approach you. And, you know, right after you've spent like 15, 10 minutes, just, you know, taking pictures of all of nature and all its beauty, you now have to like hook up your little dead elk and, uh,
Speaker: Well, he ain't so dead, like you said. He jerks his head, and the picture that we see is of our boy getting heated off a cliff, much like his brother. Yeah.
Speaker: And unfortunately, i mean, that's the end of Sam Finch. I mean, it is kind of funny that they both went off a cliff doing what they loved.
Speaker: You know, there's something to be said about that. That is kind of... like i I snark, but that is absolutely the theme of the game. So that was Sam and he had a daughter Kay or sorry, that was his daughter Dawn who he had with Kay.
Speaker: Kay is not mentioned. She's not, I guess, a real finch. Dawn is Edith's mother. Dawn is also Milton's mother who I think we will talk about later. Yeah, we'll definitely be mentioning Milton.
Speaker: Do you remember Odin's story at all? He was the he's the ancestor that came from from Norway, right? Yes. Brought along the whole house to escape the curse.
Speaker: Yeah, his story was told through like those old timey, what is it like an oscilloscope or something? Yeah, his story is told through like and ah an old oscilloscope. And it's ah almost like you're learning about Lumen, like Lumen's origins if you're a severance watcher.
Speaker: man Man pioneered, his family came with, and the Finch line began. After Odin, we are introduced to Walter. Walter is kind of interesting in that he's not interesting at all.
Speaker: Walter waited. he he was ah he has the longest life, I think, of anybody in the family. Fifty three years. So Edie Finch is actually the oldest. She is ninety ninety three.
Speaker: 93 years at young. She is the last story that we will talk about. But ah Walter was a doomsday prepper. He had had all of his siblings killed. He was feeling anxious. He was feeling very scared.
Speaker: ah So he just decided to be a doomsday guy and eat tomato paste for his entire life. And when we play as this guy, we are just systematically and routinely just hucking, hucking stuff in our face. We're just, you know, joylessly eating, living in underground bunker, living in an underground bunker, just watching, the you know, exes go from days into nights, tallying up whatever, you know, prison like tally system you've got. And before you know it, 50 years have passed.
Speaker: And This family, all of them dealt with their trauma so unhealthily that every one of his in this family just let him. And one day he just decides, I'm going to go.
Speaker: I'm going to see the light. I want to feel the the sun on my face just one time. And he does. And then he gets hit by a train. And then he gets hit by a train.
Speaker: What else is there to say? you know, sometimes life is worth getting hit by a train for. From and Kay, we now move up to the second-to-last branch system in this family, and we do narrow our people down just a little bit.
Speaker: Gus and Gregory. So I guess we should talk about Gregory first because he is actually the one with the shortest lifespan of a single year. He was one years old when he died 1977.
Speaker: It was between Sam and Kay that this child was made. And it looks like Sam and Kay were going through a divorce or at least some very rough marital times.
Speaker: It would make the trip that Sam engaged with Don, that hunting trip would make a lot more sense because it would be ah time for him to see his daughter and a one-on-one sort of capacity.
Speaker: But Kay is watching the baby, turned off the water, the bath is over. We are the baby, and we see, from our perspective, magical things that we are making happen. We are...
Speaker: dancing whimsically with every you know, ducky and froggy in our bathtub. We are just watching everything with a child's like wonder just turn into a ballet and so essentially in front of you and actually we hear what is it? Tchaikovsky?
Speaker: But no, no, no, no and and know i think it is wal also of the flower is by tchaikovsky Waltz of the Flowers by Tchaikovsky. Well, there you go.
Speaker: So that ah that particular scene was very disturbing to me. Oh? I mean, for all intents and purposes, you're playing through the sequence where ah baby is going to die.
Speaker: Yep. But I mean, they're all going to die. Well, yeah. but I mean, i yeah. i I don't know. It's it's sad.
Speaker: It's all sad. It's all very sad. I guess this one is particularly sad. I mean, it's not like I need to be convinced that a baby dying is sad. It's just that the the the message of this game is just sort of at odds.
Speaker: it's It's not that it's at odds with it. It's that it's... Well, I ah distinctly remember when I was playing through it. and At this point in the game, I knew what was coming.
Speaker: and i didn't want to do the next step because I was like just as awful and somehow also strangely peaceful I think handled it in a very tactful way yeah because we actually experienced the story through the letter of that Sam had written to Kay and he had done so in a very sentimental very kind way he says You know, I i know it wasn't your fault.
Speaker: And I know that Gregory was just full of joy. And that's the thing is, is I think that they frame it so well where somebody as painlessly and and honestly as they can reaffirming, absolving them of guilt. It's, you know, it's just a quick little passage in a game, but I think thematically it's actually quite, quite beautiful.
Speaker: Yeah, you know, ah yeah, that's something that hits hits kind of home for me personally. i yeah This whole game is dancing around this idea of like this family tragedy. And how can you not feel like a family is plagued when you have the average lifespan of your family members is like essentially like 17 or something, maybe worse.
Speaker: Yeah, we're 20 and 30. Yeah, I mean, we I wouldn't mind doing the math. I'll do the math later. If you leave Edie Sr. out, it is dramatically less.
Speaker: She has a profound impact on the average lifespan. Yeah, she is and outlier. Let's see. All right. 478 divided by 12 is 34. They have an average lifespan of 34 years.
Speaker: Is that including or not including? Edie. That is including Edie. If you take their total lifespan, though, you said 400 something. She is almost she's she's a third of their total family lifespan. Yep.
Speaker: She so the average lifespan without it is 28. So that is, you know, whatever that is good for. That's a big impact. That's a big impact. um So.
Speaker: With. Yeah, so Gregory is a one-year-old boy. He does pass away quite young. Don goes on to spawn a family. But before any of that can be dealt with, we do need to talk about Gus.
Speaker: Gus did not give a lying F word. The reason I say that is he's the only character in maybe video game history that I've played where there's an actual middle finger button.
Speaker: Kid is standing outside flying his kite, not a care in the world while his dad gets married and ah remarried, I guess, to some unnamed person. All we really know is he didn't like her um and that he would also die and that she would likely die.
Speaker: He's flying his kite and you're just basically like almost in a Katamari way, just picking up objects as you fly this kite around. And it kind of turns into a tornado and a twister and You were sort of sucked up into it.
Speaker: All the kid wanted to do was fly his kite and he did it. He did it harder than any kid has ever done it, apparently. you can also kind of turn this into a cautionary tale and say every single one of these characters died because of a there was no one there to say, hey, that's a bad idea.
Speaker: Go out and get a friend, everybody. ah Just one friend. Somebody somebody knows you make make them know you more. Someone is not afraid to say, hey, don't do that. So now we get to the meat and potatoes of this family stew.
Speaker: Milton. Milton. We're going to talk about him after I decided. I just decided. Lewis. Lewis is the second to last level in this entire game. Lewis is the most creatively ambitious part of the game by far.
Speaker: Do you want to talk about Lewis first or should I? No, go ahead. and Okay, cool. So actually before this, I want to say that the way that we get to Lewis's room Lewis is a pod head. He's a stoner.
Speaker: He likes to get high and play video games in that way. he may not be dissimilar from you after going down into the bunker and up into another part of the house so from where our...
Speaker: ah hoarding uncle is at this point where he died on the train tracks. We continue from the tracks. We go over by the Bayside and we see the old Finch household and we see it in the water and it is impossible to get. It would have to be the lowest tide that you would ever seen to, to get to this house.
Speaker: But maybe every once in a while, tide will happen. So from there, we go into Gregory's. Is it Gregory? Lewis. We go into Lewis's stoner cave, and it is at the second highest part of the entire Finch household.
Speaker: Actually, I think it is the highest room. I think Milton's before. Which makes total sense, because he likes to be high. Okay, that actually is hilarious. Okay, so Lewis is working at the fish factory. He's plagued.
Speaker: absolutely plagued with trauma. He is I think he's by far the most traumatized individual in that family. His younger brother has gone.
Speaker: Milton disappears in 2003. Lewis has been working at the fish factory, getting through life the whole time. He's, you know, seeing a shrink in the letter we're reading is actually a note from the therapist to his mom.
Speaker: And it's saying that she was aware of his delusions, but she didn't know how deep these delusions got. So you work at the fish factory and you are just in on the left side of the screen. It starts off, you're piloting his imagination as it ascends from a monochromatic, simplistic dungeon explorer to a fully involved, choice-driven, minion-producing, multiple NPCs having...
Speaker: ah full-on adventure. You basically have the totality of, like, ah civilization a Sid Meier civilization game happen in, like, 5, 5, 7, 10, 12 minutes around there.
Speaker: So, you are the entire time, or you are just, you know, on the left stick of your controller or on your WASD on your keyboard, piloting this video game within a video game that is happening through our characters imagination.
Speaker: And on the right side of the screen, you are just shucking fish into a guillotine that is systematically and painlessly and, you know, horrifyingly killing them and then you're shucking them onto a belt.
Speaker: So it's just this move to the right motion, move up motion. And you're only tolerating that so you can do the fun stuff with your left hand, which is playing this video game within a video game.
Speaker: It on a meta level is sending this message that that we are only doing the right handed stuff so that we can do the left handed stuff in life. I mean, it's and not wrong necessarily.
Speaker: Absolutely not wrong. And the older we get, the less control we really have of that. It's... It's very sad. it's it's the It's the future a lot of us live currently.
Speaker: And it's only all too common these days to just have absolutely no say at what goes on. Well, ah but i would what I said when I played through it was that it's it's an embodiment of this concept of you work to live as opposed to live to work.
Speaker: Yeah. I think Lewis as a character really kind of personifies that and that his line started to blur. um And it's because of the because of the trauma he wasn't able to... he He just wasn't able to reconcile those two sides of himself.
Speaker: He was not. It goes a lot further than that if going into psychology, but... that's a much Lewis could do an entire psychology episode about Lewis alone. Oh, yeah. he is somebody who, unlike every single other Finch, he actually did let his demons get the better of him. And and he is the only one to not only take his own life, but to die unhappily.
Speaker: You know, maybe the father, Sam... of dawn you know died with some fear as he was shocked or maybe the calvin when he was shocked but overall all those people were pursuing what i think they wanted i guess it could be said that he pursued lewis pursued what he wanted up until the end but his feels more like a resignation than i think any of the others Yeah. and And... Maybe Edie, but we will get to her in a moment. Edie we will get to. In fact, we'll get to her very soon. But right now we're going to take a one-step lower look at Milton's room.
Speaker: Because Milton has been teased this entire time as the only Finch that has gone missing. This is... Sort of true. ah He's certainly gone missing to them and he he has not died.
Speaker: He is also maybe one of the only ones to have escaped in a positive manner as he is actually the star of this game's predecessor, not produced by Anna, not ah distributed by Annapurna.
Speaker: And that is the unfinished swan. You know, we're talking about the spirit of something and spirit is that they're connected. um Milton in his room, it is adorned with all of the most famous paintings from the unfinished swan, which is on its own very distinct visually as well as its gameplay.
Speaker: And the unfinished swan, I will say without spoiling much of and anything, it it does have a happy ending. And Milton, he does get out, whatever getting out looks like.
Speaker: Well, I haven't played Unfinished One, so i don't know I don't know the ending. um but It is interesting to note that he is the only person that doesn't die when, aye you know, the reason Odin left Norway is to get away that from this supposed family curse.
Speaker: Yeah. Which I know we're going to dig into a little bit after we discuss Edie Sr. But for all intents and purposes, Milton might have been the one that escaped the curse.
Speaker: he um He is maybe the only one that proves that there is not a curse. Because I don't, at least not within the confines of that. i don't know.
Speaker: I don't know how much can be said about it logistically. Because, like, and we we come to find out through our next story that it's not really a curse at all.
Speaker: It's don't get me wrong. There is tragedy. There is patterns of premature deaths. But as the crux and narrative climax of our story happens is in the examination Edith Finch.
Speaker: So Edith Finch named after her grandmother, Edie Finch. Junior. Edie Junior. Edie Junior. A female junior. How about that?
Speaker: All right. Well, just when you thought this game couldn't get more interesting. So Edith, we are put into the shoes of Edith. When um Lewis has just killed himself.
Speaker: Milton is gone. Don is ready to take Edith away from this house. This house that she is convinced is cursed, who has its its doors boarded up, has lost 10 of its family members, and Don is convinced that she has to take Edith and go.
Speaker: So on the last supper that they're ever going to have, An argument ensues. Edith is told to go pack her stuff.
Speaker: And when she does this, she approaches ah covered she a door she's not supposed to. She goes into the door and she finds a letter that her grandmother wrote.
Speaker: And then we are transported from child Edith to super duper ah not child Edith Sr. And Edie Sr. And Edie Sr. is talking about the lowest tide that had happened in her 93 years. It was such a low tide.
Speaker: that she had finally been able to go back to the old house. And this is where we, as the player, are finally able to satiate our curiosity. We are finally able to grant... We are granted the reward that video games promise, which is that we will get to do the thing that we want. We are going to get to scratch every itch that could exist because in video games and in fiction in general, and all written all written work is fiction in a way,
Speaker: that it has to make sense, whereas reality does not. And what Edith Finch does, I think, that is so incredible, is it allows us to get this moment, have it narratively indulge, get so close to it. We are approaching where the sea was. We're walking as Edie, and we're getting closer and closer, and we see the house, the old Finch house that was...
Speaker: and we unlock it. We move forward, and then the narration is cut. Dawn, who is the mother of young Edith Jr., our titular character,
Speaker: removes her from reading the story. Edith Finch did not get to finish reading the story, which means we the player did not get to finish Edie's story. She talks about how this is the last time that she'll ever see her grandmother.
Speaker: And she's put into the back of a car and she's whisked away. She said that was the last time she ever saw the house.
Speaker: And then the next day, Sr. is found dead after mixing alcohol with her medication. Was it an accident? Did she commit suicide?
Speaker: Not sure. Well, what we are sure of, unfortunately, is that Edith, she says, if you're if you're hearing this, if you're reading this, it's because I'm no longer with you.
Speaker: It means that I was not able to tell you these things in person and that I had to write them down. I want you to know that I don't think that we were cursed, that I think it's amazing that any of us got to be here at all, that we all have a chance.
Speaker: And that was very powerful to me. It was a little... i feel the need to insult it so as to give myself control over it. But the truth is, it was very moving.
Speaker: um I'm somebody who has ah something of a family curse myself. so I've had two of my siblings die at the young age of 20, and i am ah above 20.
Speaker: And I mean, these are people that used to be my my older siblings. And now... they stopped growing and I didn't stop. And now they're my younger siblings. I'm filled with so much more knowledge and experiences than they have been.
Speaker: And it's ah
Speaker: lame to say, but it's profound. land it And something like this makes me happy to be doing bill the life that I am.
Speaker: The job that I am, I do what I have to with the right hand so that I get have fun with the left, much like Lewis. But life is a lot of things, but it's also, it's just this playground, man. It can be whatever you want.
Speaker: It is. It also comes with, ah you know, the good times and the bad times and the ah struggles and, mean, the death. we've i would say we've both seen our share.
Speaker: Yes. um
Speaker: But...
Speaker: I have always been the person who believes strongly that the difficult times are there to help us appreciate the good times better.
Speaker: And I feel like that's where the game leaves us is this this weird sense of hope for Edie's child. um As you discover that that's who she was telling the story to and getting to leave him with A, being the last Finch.
Speaker: but also maybe escaping the so-called family curse by being aware of what it is early on and seeing the hope at the end.
Speaker: And for him to know his his foundation, because I think that is important. I think that's another thing that the game is trying to stress that your Your background matters, and it also doesn't. you know It doesn't matter what skin color you have or what what way your mouth has chosen to make communication sounds. you know i mean These are deeply human problems. death yeah life is Life is just full of a bunch of people that haven't died yet and a bunch of people that also have died completely.
Speaker: um And how we choose to make meaning out of this is is kind of up to every single one of us. it's It's a mission without direction. It's politics without politics.
Speaker: It's just... It's an adventure. And it's a game like this that can be so stringent in its options. So, you know, dissectable.
Speaker: So segmented and so diverse that can just make you feel, just for a little bit, what it might be like to have overcome something.
Speaker: I don't know. This isn't Dark Souls. You're not going to conquer a boss that's bested you 150 times. This isn't that kind of empowering. that's This isn't endorphin-inducing. This is something that's more life-affirming. This is watching but a real pain. This is is like watching a real pain.
Speaker: It's life-affirming. It's sad. It's honest. It goes there a little bit. And the developer Ian Dallas is kind of an interesting guy. he's He's still got his Tumblr page up if anybody wants to check it out.
Speaker: In it, he first off, this man called the he has like 13 posts, right? And one of them is about the leftovers. this The leftovers is absolutely topical.
Speaker: On top of my just ridiculous fandom to it. The leftovers is about what happens to the world. What happens to existence. What happens to the value of life and the ways that we measure success and happiness when we know for a fact that there is a a cosmic inability to be certain?
Speaker: ah All of the things that make you safe are taken away from you. And it happens to these characters after one day for no reason, out of nowhere, 2% of the world's population is taken away.
Speaker: um he He says, I'll quote him right here. um It's a show full of weird and unpredictable events. ah The focus is on finding the human moments that these events create.
Speaker: The range of what the show tackles it mostly gets away with is inspiring. It can be funny. The 80s sitcom Perfect Strangers gets referenced multiple times, culminating in a major plot point in the third season that manages to both feel ridiculous and heartfelt.
Speaker: That's actually hilarious. He's right. But this is a guy whose favorite game is something else we'll include in the description, but he he his favorite game is this browser game.
Speaker: Not his favorite. One of his favorites. One of his favorite games is about is a browser game about selling paper clips, raising and lowering the price, ah conceptualizing ways of automation.
Speaker: But ultimately, it's just this like economic simulator. It's this raw piece of math that you know somehow counts as a video game. And this is the kind of story that a guy like this decided to tell.
Speaker: He got a bunch of money to make sure he did it right. He got Annapurna Interactive off the ground. he could They could have been a joke, but after this, they decided to put some money into Flower by that game company.
Speaker: um They ported it to Windows and iOS. I mean, you know, that game was already kind of spoken for, but then you have things like Gorogoa, Donut County. That was a lot of fun. Ashen is interesting.
Speaker: Gone Home is another first-person narrative game that has gotten a lot of buzz. Journey, I mean, Outer Wilds. Outer Wilds is one of the most phenomenal games of all time. Keita Takahashi's Watam.
Speaker: He's actually working on a game. It's called To a T. It's about a guy who can never put his arms down from the T shape. It's a like, you know, Keita Takahashi is this weird, weird guy that we're going to talk about at some point.
Speaker: ah He's a guy who has been funded by companies to conceptualize adult playgrounds that have like 60 foot tall so seesaws.
Speaker: And this man makes video games. He made Katamari Damashi and its sequel. i' saying 60 foot tall balls of stickiness. that That would be. Yeah. yeah Don't don't tempt me with a good time.
Speaker: Hell. The soundtrack was also done by Jeff Russo, who has also done amazing things from, ah you know, Fargo's soundtrack. The show, by the way, ah the Legion soundtrack, also the show.
Speaker: You know, it's kind of funny because ah apparently I guess he did the music for Star Trek Discovery, Star Trek Picard, Star Trek Strange New Worlds. The newer ones, yeah. In each of those cases, while I am a huge Star Trek fan, I skipped the opening credits because I'm not a big fan of the music. Really?
Speaker: Well, this was a little bit more of an intimate look at something. more More focused, more itemized, more... ah Intentional.
Speaker: Personal or intimate. And I've enjoyed it. I hope you guys have enjoyed it too. If you have played this game and you want to say something we haven't or endorse something we would not, I don't know, put it in the comments.
Speaker: Yeah, and also, if there's something that you want us to talk about, even if it's something that we've lambasted, like, Fortnite. We play it all.
Speaker: ah We'll be glad to. We do not discriminate. i know we I know we avoid doing a ah review thing, but ah you had started to ask what what my seal of approval would be on ah on what remains of Edith Finch.
Speaker: Yeah, we're we're not going to new enumerate everything, but like, yeah, what what do you got to say? So if I had to just declare the reason that I wanted you to play Edith Finch, the reason why I would want everybody to play Edith Finch is because it becomes this discussion almost with with the game designers, but also with yourself about grief and hope.
Speaker: And loss. and that i think is the most beneficial thing that anybody can take from that game uh yeah it's really clever quirky game design and we can laugh about the rube goldberg-esque nature of the rooms uh we can talk about the you know the brilliant use of the Unreal Engine to tell the story of these characters and tell you who they are ah without, you know, actually being there. But the real crux of the story is grief and hope.
Speaker: And I think we could all all benefit from that. Like I said, if you have something you want us to to dig in on, let us know. We'll do it. If you're hearing this, you've made it all the way through to the end of this episode and we could not be more thrilled.
Speaker: Thank you for your time. Thank you for giving us the greatest currency you can give anything, which is your valuable, valuable time and effort and energy. If you are here, we can ah can have a real quick chat later.
Speaker: A bit of an editor's note. When recording this episode, Lee and Alec thought that the that that the character you play as in the Unfinished Swan is Milton, the missing child.
Speaker: When in fact, the king is Milton, de facto antagonist. But as you learned through playing the game... The Finch curse takes many forms.
Speaker: The Unfinished Swan is certainly a game deserving of our microscopic lens, as well as an infinite hug. We hope you enjoyed this more intimate and personal look for business inquiries.
Speaker: Reach out to us to enjoy stuff at at gmail.com. And for personal, leave a comment on your listening platform of choice.
Speaker: Soon we will have gameplay edits with this on YouTube. But right now, you're it, baby.
Speaker: you
