I’d like to start by giving credit to the game developers for creating unique and interesting ways of telling stories and keeping them so individual to each member of the Finch family.
This one will be a bit different, mostly because I believe this particular game is one that’s best experienced yourself and for you to make your own mind up about it so further along I’ll mostly be running through the beginning and two of my favourite stories.
This was a short game I smashed through in one sitting but really loved exploring the tragedies of the Finches. For context, your “player” takes a ferry, clutching a diary, to an island which is home to the ancestral home of the Finch Family.
It’s quite a sad but beautifully told story with a good mix of immersiveness and visual novel-esque storytelling. Every member of the family has died in an unexpected way and each personality is beautifully shown, portrayed with unique art styles and gameplays. If you want to know more details, keep reading. If not, stop here if you don’t want to spoil it for yourself.
From this point there will be incredibly HEAVY SPOILERS
I won’t deep dive into all of the deaths because I’d really recommend you play this yourself, so here are some of my favourites:
Barbara Finch
Barbara Finch’s death was probably my most liked story, not because it was particularly nice, it was actually quite brutal, but the style was really amazing and just added to the eeriness of it all. It’s shown in a comic strip style with a pumpkin-headed narrator (who has a really creepy voice).
o Barbara was a child star known for her scream in her films and as she got older, her voice changed and she could no longer reach the pitch she used to be able to.
On her 16th birthday, she’s in the house with her boyfriend, Rick, and is worried when he doesn’t come back from the basement. At the same time there’s a killer on the loose named the hookman (wonder why?).
She heads into the kitchen where she’s scared by Rick who jumps out at her, they argue and he leaves. Following this, the hookman breaks into the house, where Barbara fights him off. She manages to sneak through the various secret passages and clobber him around the head at which point he falls down the stairs. When she goes to check, the body is gone and there’s a knock at the front door. It turns out to be a “surprise party” full of all of her friends in masks. The story is that no one really knows exactly what happened to Barbara, but the most convincing interpretation in my opinion is a burglary gone wrong.
The point of view of this story is from a comic strip released a year after Barbara’s death so it really feeds into the whole unreliable narrator of it.
Walter Finch
This one really broke my heart. Walter, traumatised after his sister Barbara’s death, creates an underground bunker to stay safe in. He spends every day exactly the same, waking up at the same time and eating the same food.
The story is a first person POV so you briefly play as Walter through his time in the bunker. There’s a mysterious “shaking”, as he puts it, which he narrates that it’s getting easier to get used to the longer he spends in this bunker.
One day, so tired of living the same day for the past 30 years, Walter decides he’s had enough. You then play through his great escape, grabbing a pickaxe and bashing down the wall. What really got me is that he talks about finally wanting to enjoy what’s left of his life and savour all of the food, even if he only has a day left. Now remember that rumbling or shaking? We then find out that he’s been living under some train tracks this entire time. Walter emerges directly in a tunnel and as he’s walking out of the end of the tunnel, looking up at the sky a train appears from around the corner and… you know the rest.
Whilst the play-style didn’t really differ much from the main gameplay in this one, I think playing the same thing over and over again, not knowing how long you were going to be actually doing it, did make you feel like you were experiencing Walter’s life. And right at the end you’re rooting for him and really loving how hopeful he is and suddenly he gets hit by a train.
Lewis Finch
This is the last of the three I’m going to share mostly because I had no idea where this was going, but my god this was such a cool way of telling this story. So Lewis had been struggling with his mental health and we pick up at his job in a cannery, grabbing fish, putting them through a guillotine and sending them to be processed further.
The narrator in this I believe is his therapist or medical professional of some kind who’s describing what Lewis told her during their sessions. He starts to imagine a world as a form of escapism during his job that starts off as just a labyrinth which you then get to play through all the while processing these fish.
The labyrinth devolves into a top down of a fantasy world at which point he realises he can change the narrative into whatever he wants and go about making a dog companion and little townsfolk. The whole world expands to your whole field of vision as he said across this mind map choosing your own choices, ultimately it makes no difference to the end result. Lewis stays at the cannery and stops coming home and in this fantasy world he is eventually crowned king of a castle in a far away castle.
As Lewis goes up to get his crown, the view shifts back to the cannery and you see him doing the motions without there being any fish coming at him. You, in first person, walk up the conveyor belt and as you bend down to receive the crown a guillotine descends.
I don’t think I described this as best as I possibly could have but this was one of the best ways of showing what’s going but again from the point of view of the doctor who’s telling us what happened through a letter. I would so recommend this game, it’s quite sad and feels like it’s an ode to grief almost, but it’s so wonderfully portrayed and is just beautiful throughout.
Images taken from Wikipedia and IGN
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. Feel free to like this post or leave a comment if you have thoughts on the game, or just want to say hi.
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