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"A lot of this isn't going to make sense to you and I'm sorry about that."

What Remains of Edith Finch is an Environmental Narrative Game developed by Giant Sparrow and published by Annapurna Interactive. It was released on April 25, 2017, and follows Edith Finch, the last living member of the Finches, returning to her ancestral home in an attempt to learn more about her extended family, whose members were prone to unusual deaths and whose rooms in the house have been more or less left in the condition they were in at the time they passed away.


This game provides examples of:

  • 360-Degree Swing Set Swing: After Barbara's death, Calvin decides never to be afraid again, so he attempts to do a 360 on a swing facing a cliff. He succeeds, falling off the cliff at the end. In the present day, 46 years later, the swing is still there wound up the tree.
  • Added Alliterative Appeal: In Lewis' story, when he is pursuing the queen/prince, their quest can be either "sinister serpents" or "radiant rainbows".
  • Ambiguous Situation:
    • The circumstances of Molly, Barbara, and Milton's deaths are left just vague enough for players to draw their own interpretations. Or in the case of Milton, whether or not he's the King from The Unfinished Swan.
    • Whether Lewis intended to kill himself is also ambiguous, as his declining awareness of reality and trance-like state in the final part of the flashback imply that he wasn't fully aware of what he was doing.
  • And Now for Someone Completely Different: A large part of the game. Each flashback has you play, still from a first-person perspective, a different member of the Finch family at the moment they died.
  • Animal Motifs: With a family name like "Finch", of course, there are knick-knacks and the like with birds on them in and around the house. Edith's journal also has birds sketched around the family tree. Edie is especially associated with birds, as her bedroom door is painted with birds, and she has multiple bird cages in her room memorializing past pets.
  • Art Shift:
    • Barbara's story is in the style of a cel-shaded comic book. Justified, as Edith is reading a comic based on her death.
    • Edith's portrait for Milton is based on his self-portrait from his flipbook. As such, it's more cartoony looking compared to the realistic drawings for the rest of the Finches. His self-portrait in particular resembles a younger version of the King from The Unfinished Swan.
    • Lewis' fantasy world looks like an old-style fantasy video game. As the story progresses, it gets more and more realistic, switching from a top-down view to isometric, then full 3D by the end, but still keeping its simplified look.
  • Artistic License – Geography:
    • The game takes place on Orcas Island, part of the San Juans in Washington State. Barbara's disappearance is investigated by the non-existent Orcas Island Police Dept, wearing blue uniforms. Law enforcement on Orcas Island is provided by the San Juan County Sheriff's dept, who wear khaki uniforms.
    • Walter is struck and killed by a train after emerging from under the house. There have never been any trains or rail lines on Orcas Island.
  • Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Milton may have done this, or he may have just run away from home.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: The house looks like something Willy Wonka would have built for Tom Sawyer; it is loaded with rickety walkways, rope ladders, tree houses and secret passageways. It is also incredibly dangerous, and it is astounding that only one Finch fell to their death from its various unguarded ledges.
  • Awesome Moment of Crowning: The culmination of Lewis' fantasy quest sees him become supreme king of his world in an epic celebration, kneeling to be crowned by his love interest. In reality, he's being Driven to Suicide and decapitating himself with the fish chopper. Even in the fantasy, the crowning has a horrifying undercurrent: the "altar" at which King Lewis is crowned resembles a guillotine.
  • Bait-and-Switch: Similar to Gone Home. Edith's foreboding narration upon reaching the house, the topic of a family death curse, the darkened foyer and mysteriously ruined kitchen, and the ominous locked basement can give the impression of a horror game; it's actually an Environmental Narrative Game with a heavy focus on emotional storytelling.
  • Be Careful What You Wish For: One interpretation of the curse, assuming it's real, is that it kills members of the Finch family by giving them what they want in one twisted way or another. For some, the connection is less obvious than others, but it still holds through in many cases:
    • Odin wanted to bring his family to America in an effort to escape the family curse, so his family did indeed make it to America, but he drowned before setting foot on land again.
    • Molly was ravenously hungry, so the curse served her up a savage feast... and then made her the final course.
    • Calvin wanted to feel like he was flying, so the curse made the wind pick him up and throw him over a cliff.
    • Barbara wanted to recapture her famous scream, so the curse provided her with... inspiration.
    • Walter managed to survive for thirty years by making sure to want nothing at all. Then he decided that that was no way to live and that he was willing to die if it meant going outside again... and sure enough, the curse struck him down the moment he set foot outdoors.
    • Gus wanted to ruin his father's wedding, so the curse sent a storm that did just that, and which killed Gus in the bargain.
    • Sam wanted to spend time doing something with his daughter. He got to do just that with Dawn, right up until the deer they were hunting threw him to his death. The curse even immortalized the moment with a photo.
    • Gregory, a baby, wanted to play with his bath toys. His dying dream featured the toys coming to life and swimming to the "other side" with him, so he could play with them forever.
    • Lewis wanted something brighter and more interesting than his humdrum life working a monotonous job, so the curse provided him with such a rich fantasy life that he either killed himself on purpose so that he would never have to leave it, or killed himself accidentally because he was so immersed in his fantasy that he had no idea what he was actually doing in real life.
    • Milton wanted to get away from the curse and become a famous painter. It's implied that he's the only one who successfully broke the curse, but far too late; his mother and siblings still died in painful ways. If you believe that he's the King from The Unfinished Swan, his art is unseen by almost everyone real, and his obsession with perfection angers his fictional subjects enough to abandon him.
    • Edie's wish (as speculated) could be that she wanted to live the rest of her life with her family. The curse provided her with a long life with her family, but at the cost of being Forced to Watch (and in some cases, unwittingly contributing to) the deaths of several generations of loved ones. Eventually, Dawn abandoned her with Edith, and she crossed the Despair Event Horizon, dying alone in her house.
    • Dawn wanted to escape the melodrama of the family she had been born into, so the curse turned her into a rootless wanderer for years before killing her in a painfully mundane and dreary way. note 
    • In contrast to her mother, Edith wants to reconnect to her family. In the end she dies in childbirth, both continuing the family tradition of dying young and ensuring that the family will go on for at least one more generation.
  • Bittersweet Ending: Edith dies giving birth to her son, her last narration stating that if he ever reads her journal, it means she never got to know him. He's returned to the family home, and has a cast on his arm, suggesting that he might perpetuate the family curse. However, the Finches are still standing, still take pride in their family history, and now there are two branches (Christopher and Monroe), implying that the curse is wearing down.
  • Bizarrchitecture: The Finch house is certainly unique - a large, stately home riddled with secret passages, which later had carnival-like additions nailed on and joined to the house with precarious staircases and rope pulleys. The additions seem to have been added on with only a passing nod to such things as "structural integrity" and "basic safety"; it's a wonder they haven't fallen off and joined the original house in the bay.
  • Bloody Handprint: A bloody handprint can be seen on a door in the Creepy Basement in Barbara's story. It was caused by Sven Finch, who hurt himself with a table saw right beforehand.
  • Book Ends: Lewis' funeral is one of the first things Edith mentions in her narration, and his death is the last visited in flashback before the ending.
  • Book Safe: The first secret passage is concealed by a book.
  • Both Sides Have a Point: Edith notes that as a child, she was entirely on Edie's side when it came to keeping the stories of the Finch family alive, but as a late-teen she's more understanding of her mother's desire to put all the tragedy and suffering behind her. She still ends up agreeing with Edie, though, as evidenced by the game's narration being her written account of the family’s history.
  • Call-Forward: If you believe that something supernatural is happening, then Milton Finch's short life in the house potentially becomes the backstory of the King in The Unfinished Swan, another game by the same developers.
  • Character Death: The whole point of the game. Edith's entire family is dead by the start; the flashbacks piece together how.
    • Molly was either eaten by a monster under her bed, or simply died of food poisoning after eating gerbil food, toothpaste, and holly berries, hallucinating becoming a cat, an owl, a shark, and a sea monster.
    • Odin uprooted his house and his remaining family to escape the curse. Unfortunately, a wave sank both him and the house.
    • Calvin flew over a cliff after attempting a 360-Degree Swing Set Swing.
    • Barbara was implicitly murdered by a Serial Killer who left her ear in the music box. They never found the rest of her.
    • Walter broke through a wall into a tunnel and was hit by a train.
    • Sam was pushed off a mountain by a deer in front of his daughter.
    • Gus was killed by debris during a storm at his father's second wedding.
    • Gregory drowned in the bath due to his mother's inattentiveness.
    • Milton never dies onscreen, since his disappearance was never solved. The one clue we get tells us that he either ran away from home or Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence. It is implied that he may be the same character as the King from The Unfinished Swan, meaning he possibly outlived Edith herself.
    • Lewis decapitated himself with the chopper at the cannery after realizing that his real life could never live up to the dream kingdom he created (that, or he immersed himself so deeply into his fantasy that he was simply unaware of the real-life danger).
    • Edie died the night after Dawn dragged Edith away from the house. The circumstances aren't specified, but dialogue at the dinner table implies that she had mixed her pills with alcohol when she realized her last living family was abandoning her.
    • Dawn develops cancer and dies holding Edith's hand at the hospital.
    • Edith dies in childbirth, accepting that she won't be there to see her son live his life.
    • Monroe from The Unfinished Swan is also presumably still alive and implied to be related to the Finch family through Milton, although neither he nor his surviving cousin are aware of each other's existence.
  • Chekhov's Gun:
    • The music box in the hallway can be turned on early on, but becomes a plot point two-thirds of the way into the game.
    • When Edith enters the pink bathroom, there's a toy frog on the sink. This frog was one of Gregory's toys, present when he drowns in the bathtub, later into the game.
  • Conveniently Interrupted Document: In the Edie sequence, Dawn takes the book from Edith before she can learn what Edie found in the old house.
  • Creative Closing Credits: In the credits, there is a childhood photo of each member of the development team shown among props from the game. In the end, there is a group photo of the whole team.
  • Curse: The Finch family believes themselves to have a death curse. It's left ambiguous whether they really are supernaturally cursed, or whether the belief in the curse just leads them to dangerous acts of recklessness and magical thinking.
  • Dead Man Writing: This is how the stories of Molly, Walter, and Edith are told, through a diary they wrote just before they died. Depending on your interpretation, so is Milton's, which is an animated drawing in a flipbook of him leaving, created just before he disappeared.
  • Death of a Child: Several of the dead family members are children (Molly, Calvin, Gregory, Gus, possibly Milton) or teenagers (Barbara, Lewis, Edith).
  • Despair Event Horizon: Several characters cross it.
    • Walter is so traumatized by his sister Barbara's death that he hides in an underground bunker for 30 years, too scared of the curse to go outside.
    • Lewis crosses it when he realizes that his normal life could never measure up to his fantasy world.
    • Edie is implied to have crossed it when she realizes that Dawn is taking Edith and abandoning the house and her. It's implied that she then committed suicide by mixing her pills with alcohol.
  • Didn't Think This Through: A constant theme of the game is that members of the Finch family are prone to making grand gestures and acting on story-logic rather than common sense, and that this frequently ends badly for them.
  • Died on Their Birthday: Barbara Finch, a child star in horror movies in the 1940's and 50's, was born on October 31, 1944 and died on her 16th birthday—October 31, 1960—after she gets killed by her own "fans."
  • Double-Meaning Title: As there are two characters named Edith Finch, the title can refer to both. Edith "Edie" Finch, Sr. is the matriarch of the Finch family, having been the first to land in America and construct the house with her husband Sven. She spent the remaining seventy years of her life there, watching her family grow and die in equal measure. What remains of her are her house and the stories of her progeny, which are the main focus of the game, as well as Edith Finch, Jr., the last of the Finch line. It isn't clear until the end what remains of her: a son, Christopher, who embodies Edith's hopes that the family can live on without curses and tragedy.
  • Driven to Suicide:
    • Lewis, although given his mental state at the time, whether he intended to do this or not is questionable.
    • Edie may have done this too, though her death is slightly more ambiguous. Late-game dialogue implies that she started mixing her pills with alcohol after learning that Dawn was planning to leave with Edith.
  • Egopolis: Every city in Lewis's imaginary world is named after him.
  • Empty Bedroom Grieving: Most of the rooms are kept by Edie exactly the way they were when the inhabitants died. Notably done for Calvin's part of the room, which was roped off to prevent his brother Sam from making a mess of it.
  • Family Portrait of Characterization: As the game is about the history of the Finch family, there are naturally several pictures scattered around the house that add to the atmosphere about how they lived their lives. Also, after each family member's death, Edie painted a portrait of them on a piece of wood that shows something of their story. After the sequence of said characters, Edith makes a copy of them into her own notebook.
  • Finger in the Mail: Barbara, whose ear was found inside a music box in the hallway.
  • First-Person Ghost: Averted with most characters, but played straight with Molly when she becomes a Sea Monster, as only one of her tentacles can be seen. This becomes jarring when you manage to turn around and see yourself as a tentacle appearing out of nowhere.
  • First-Person Snapshooter: Sam's sequence is narrated by Edith flipping through a set of photographs. The flashback is played out by continuously looking out of the camera's lens and taking photographs. The sequence advances if you manage to find the right shot.
  • Flashback Within a Flashback/Nested Story: The events of the game are Edith's son Christopher reading Edith's account of going back to her old house. While she's there, Edith reads several documents (like Molly's diary, an essay about how Sam wanted to remember Calvin, a comic book about Barbara, Walter's diary, pictures from Dawn and Sam's last trip, a letter to Kay about Gregory, etc.) that bring her into flashbacks showing how each family member died. Finally, the last flashback of the game consists of Edith writing down her recollection of the last time she saw Edie back when she was eleven years old, which in itself goes into a flashback when eleven-year-old Edith starts reading Edie's story of something that happened the night when Edith was born.
  • Foil: A three-way example with the brothers Calvin, Sam and Walter. After the death of their sister Barbara, Walter became so traumatised that he lived in fear for the rest of his life to the point of hiding in a bunker beneath the house for thirty years, and then dying when he stepped back into the world unprepared. Calvin, conversely, swore to never be afraid of anything again, which led to his death soon after, as he died in a childish stunt gone wrong. Sam, finally, joined the Marines, and seems to have spent his life trying to be ready for anything the world could throw at him, and raised his children the same way, which seems to have served him better than Walter's and Calvin's ways, but which still got him killed in the end in an accident on a hunting trip meant to teach his daughter survival skills. Each of the brothers was defined by the same event, each one responded to it in a different way, and each one came to a bad end because of it.
  • Foreshadowing:
    • By simply looking down, you can see Edith's protruding round belly. To observant players, the confirmation that she is pregnant will not be much of a surprise.
    • The organ music in the beginning could possibly be music at Edith's own funeral. It's also surprisingly cheery, hinting at the bittersweet nature of the ending, along with Edith facing her future Death by Childbirth with grace.
    • When you enter the bathroom in Edie's room, Edith mentions that it was the only trace in the house of Sam's first wife Kay, but it was "a pretty big trace." This initially seems to refer to how decorated the bathroom is, but later on you learn that Sam and Kay's son Gregory drowned in its bathtub.
    • If you look at the pond before entering the house for the first time, Edith mentions the story that a dragon living in the pond killed Sven. If you look closely, you can see that the thing in the pond is actually a dragon-shaped slide. Later, it is revealed that Sven did indeed die in an accident while building said slide.
    • In Molly's diary, before you start reading it, there's a barn owl feather in it. Bet you can guess which animal she changes into.
    • In Edith Sr's room, next to the door leading to the pink bathroom, there's a picture of a baby being bathed. It's likely that this is a picture of Gregory, who drowned in that bathroom.
    • When leaving Calvin's room, Edith mentions that the secret passages were built "for smaller hands and bellies". It's a hint that Edith is pregnant at the time of the narration.
    • There is also a line of narration after Walter's death scene where Edith says that there is only one "or maybe two" members of the Finch family left. While it would be reasonable for the player to assume she is referring to her brother, Milton, whose body was never found and therefore could still be alive, later events imply she is actually referring to her unborn child.
    • When Lewis is entering the throne room to be crowned King in his fantasy, it's not hard to notice before he even gets to the podium that his "throne" is a guillotine.
  • Gay Option: In Lewis' segment, the player gets to decide whether his imaginary quest was for a "beautiful prince" or a "handsome queen."
  • Generational Saga: The game tells the story of 4 generations (from Edie to Edith Jr.), or 6 if you include Odin and Christopher, Edith's son.
  • Grief-Induced Split: Sam and his first wife Kay divorce after the accidental drowning death of their son Gregory in the bathtub during the time that Kay left to take a phone call.
  • Heroic Mime: Zigzagged. The game's protagonist, Edith, narrates her childhood home visitation constantly. However, the entire game is actually being played out via her son Christopher reading her journal, who is given vague characterization and never speaks.
  • I Got Bigger: Edith notices that she has a harder time crawling through the doggy door at the age of 17 than when she was 11. It's also because she is 22 weeks pregnant at that point.
  • Irony: Despite being one of the more famous Finches (and apparently having multiple stories written about her death), the comic book telling the story of Barbara Finch's death clearly takes so many creative liberties for entertainment purposes, it's hard to tell which details presented are true, and which are fictitious.
    • Sam's attempt to combat the family curse was to become knowledgeable about survival and be prepared for anything. His death happened in the one moment he decided to let his guard down, when he ignored Dawn's claims that the deer she just shot was Not Quite Dead.
    • Walter was so traumatized by his siblings' deaths and the family curse, he hid himself in a bunker under the house and enforced a "Groundhog Day" Loop on himself for over thirty years. He died when he finally decided to break his daily cycle and smash through the wall of the bunker...right onto some train tracks.
  • It Came from the Sink: The sea monster that eats Molly comes up the toilet.
  • Justified Tutorial: Lewis's "level" contains one of the few moments of conventional gameplay, and the story starts out simple to help you get the hang of it.
  • Last-Second Photo Failure: Sam tries to take a picture of him and his daughter Dawn in front of the deer she had hunted. The picture catches Sam being hurled off the cliff by the deer as Dawn watches.
  • Letting the Air out of the Band: During the first part of Gregory's sequence, the music stops this way when you stop moving Gregory's hand.
  • Magical Realism: Even discounting the stories as Edith's fanciful imagination, the game has the air of a Fairy Tale, from its Once Upon a Time style opening to the house's Bizarrchitecture resembling a castle. And there is a house shipwrecked off the shore...
  • Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Several of the Finch family stories can be interpreted this way.
    • Molly's story. Did she really turn into a cat, an owl, a shark, and a sea monster before returning to herself (and being eaten by the sea monster she had just been), or was she hallucinating while dying of food poisoning due to eating things like toothpaste and holly berries?
    • Milton's disappearance. Did he run away from home, or did he disappear into a world he painted into reality, as his story implies?
    • The story in Edie's journal. Did she actually find something at the old house, and did the light in the window really come on, or is it just the ramblings of an imaginative old woman meant to symbolize the great unknowns of life? The journal gets torn by Dawn and the house is abandoned before we can get an answer.
    • The family curse as a whole. Does it exist, or has the Finch family's carelessness and neglect made for a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy for generations (perhaps aided by a heritable tendency for being subtle Death Seekers)? The matriarch is 93 when she dies. As the above examples show, we never do get a definite answer.
  • Military Brat: Sam having been a soldier heavily influences his way of raising his children. For example, their childrens' room looks like a barracks.
  • Mega Neko: In Lewis' sequence there is a huge version of the family's cat, Molly, in the throne room scene. If you look around Lewis' (and later Edith's) room there are toy figurines that look exactly like the people in the throne room. Compared to them, the cat is to scale. It means that as the scene plays out in Lewis' imagination, he becomes one of his toys, and the size of the cat is justified.
  • Mono no Aware: One of the central themes of the game is that life is short, so you should enjoy it while you can. Being about family members dying in various ways, often so that it could have been avoided, you would think that it's a very dark story. Yet, the overall tone is rather bright, almost light-hearted.
  • Nature Tinkling: Sam takes a pee during a hunting trip, while his daughter, Dawn, photographs it. Sam is not amused.
  • Nested Story Reveal: The outer frame of a character returning to the Finch house is set up to look like Edith's story, but is revealed to be another layer of her son returning to the grave of his mother.
  • Never Found the Body: Barbara and Milton. Barbara is at least presumed to be murdered by a Serial Killer, given that her ear was left behind; what happened to Milton is a complete mystery.
  • Never Recycle a Building: Edie refuses to clean up and re-purpose the rooms of family members. Instead, she keeps them exactly as they were, even decades after the occupants have died. The bizarre house is not merely lifeless, it is a mausoleum, with each room a Shrine to the Fallen.
  • Next Sunday A.D.: Edith Finch died in 2017, the year the game released, which means the first and last scenes of the game featuring her likely pre-teen son take place years into the future.note 
  • No OSHA Compliance:
    • The house has a lot of upper levels attached to it that look like it might collapse at any time, with the later children's rooms there. Some of the staircases leading up to these rooms are already rotting apart.
    • The cannery chopper in Lewis' story noticeably doesn't have a guard or any real protection - one would think it would be simple to implement a guard with a hole at the bottom to allow workers to efficiently slice salmon without exposing themselves to the risk of injury. One could be mistaken for thinking that Lewis' fate involves accidentally chopping his hand off or at least one of his fingers when his imagination becomes too much for him to still be aware of the position of the chopper. Granted, the fact that he successfully decapitated himself with said chopper is probably even more damning of his employer's negligence.
  • Off with His Head!: How Lewis dies, by sticking his head under the blade of the cannery chopper, with his fantasy showing as him bending down to accept the crown.
  • Ominous Music Box Tune: The music box plays a rather melancholic tune.
  • Outliving One's Offspring: Several of the Finches see their children die before them. Odin outlives his infant son Johann. Edie outlives all five of her children, and Sven manages to outlive three of them (Sam and Walter are still alive by the time he dies). Sam and Kay outlive both of their sons, leaving only Dawn, who outlives her elder son and is alive when her younger son runs away, but dies before her daughter. Gregory's is especially egregious: Babies should never be left alone in a bathtub. The only two people in the family with children to not outlive any of them are Edith (who dies while giving birth to her son), and potentially Milton on the assumption he's the King and the events of The Unfinished Swan are canon. Exaggerated with Edie, as not only does she outlive her children, but most of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren too.
  • Parental Neglect: If you do not believe in the family curse, then a lot of the deaths can be blamed on parents not paying attention:
    • Molly Finch died because Edie sent her to her room without supper, and when she got hungry, Molly ate some poisonous holly berries that had been left in her room.
    • Calvin Finch died because someone built his swing right next to a cliff and didn't watch him when he swung off it.
    • Gus Finch died because his father let him sulk outside in the middle of a debris-throwing storm.
    • Gregory Finch died because his mother went to argue with her husband on the phone while he was in the bathtub, while Gregory bumped on the faucet and drowned.
  • Parent with New Paramour: Gus is not fond of his father remarrying after divorcing Kay, to the point of refusing to attend their wedding.
  • Point of No Return: First is the doggy door. Even though the player revisits some locations in the house, the doors and equivalents tend to work in one direction only.
  • Poster-Gallery Bedroom: Most of the bedrooms give strong indications of their occupants' personality. The most straight example is Lewis' room, which is literally lined with posters.
  • Posthumous Character: Every single character but Edith is dead by the time of the game. Since the game itself is Edith's journal as read by her son Christopher, who was born as she died of childbirth, Edith counts as well.
  • Pregnant Badass: Edith shows little fear as she navigates the absurdly-unsafe abandoned Finch house. The first time her narration addresses her pregnancy, she is climbing a rickety trellis and balancing on catwalks (all alone) at a dangerous height. A slanted example, since her fearlessness is not framed as a good thing: she is taking unnecessary risks. So many members of her family have been killed by a similar careless attitude toward danger.
  • Privacy by Distraction: The final sequence is a flashback to 11-year-old Edith. Her mother Dawn and her great-grandmother Edie start arguing, so Edie tells her about some (probably non-existent) present in the hallway. In the end, she clarifies that she sends Edith away because they are arguing.
  • Public Domain Soundtrack Dissonance: Edmund Sears' "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" (1849) plays in the background while the sea monster you control eats up a ship's captain and crew members in Molly's story, while "Waltz of the Flowers" from The Nutcracker (1892) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky plays in the background while Gregory plays with the bath toys and accidentally drowns himself in his story. Not surprising, since both are Christmas songs that play at the time of the children's deaths.
  • Railing Kill: In Barbara's sequence, she knocks the hook killer off the railing. Subverted in that the killer does not actually die, in slasher villain fashion.
  • Sarcastic Confession: Edith notes early on that Edie liked to tell people that there was a mole man living beneath her land, something Edith considers an example of Edie's overall eccentricity. She later finds out that Edie's son Walter was in fact living in a bunker under the house the whole time.
  • Secret Passage: There are secret passages behind the walls of the Finch house built in by Sven Finch. Since most of the bedroom doors are sealed, they are the only way to get around the house most of the time.
  • Self-Fulfilling Prophecy:
    • Walter was so terrified of the curse getting him that he hid in an underground bunker for decades. Eventually this made him desperate enough to see the sun that he recklessly breaks out of his bunker - and onto some train tracks just as a train is coming.
    • Edith herself outright says that the Finches were so aware of the "curse" that they basically made it happen trying to avoid it.
  • Sequence Breaking: It's possible to reach the end of the game without experiencing the stories of Odin, Calvin, Sam, Gus, Gregory, Milton, and Lewis.
  • Serial Killer: One is mentioned in Barbara's story, and is presumably responsible for the death of Barbara and her boyfriend. At least, that's what the comic book telling Barbara's story claims.
  • Sheet of Glass: In Edith's timeline, there is a sturdy wooden table in the living room. In Barbara's story, there was a glass table. When Barbara hits the serial killer with Rick's crutch, he falls off the railing and lands on the table, smashing it to pieces.
  • Shout-Out:
    • When Molly turns into a shark, the music goes dum-dum-dum-dum.
    • Barbara's story is presented via a comic reminiscent of Tales from the Crypt, and even includes the theme from Halloween.
    • Milton's room, its contents and even the background music inside are all a reference to The Unfinished Swan. There's enough implication it's not a coincidence.
    • Some of the books found outside the library in the flashback to the night Edith and Dawn left the house are by Jorge Luis Borges, an author who specialised in Magical Realism. This is a nod to the Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane nature of certain elements in the story, including the Finches' curse, and the deaths of characters such as Molly and Barbara.
    • Lewis's story of retreating from a monotonous job into a fantasy world is a Whole-Plot Reference to Lord Dunsany's "The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap," with multiple echoes of phrasing from the story.
  • Single Line of Descent: The Finch family. It's justified by the curse (if indeed there is one), since only one kid from each generation would survive to have children of their own. If Milton is the King from The Unfinished Swan, then this is averted (and possibly a sign of the curse wearing down), as Monroe and Christopher would be cousins.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: Gregory's scene. The sequence depicts a one-year-old infant drowning in a bathtub. The entirety of this death scene is set to Tchaikovsky's "Waltz of the Flowers" from The Nutcracker. The effect is chilling.
  • Stealth Prequel: Possibly one to The Unfinished Swan, if Milton and the King from that game are the same character (something the game gives enough evidence for to support the possibility).
  • Stupidity Is the Only Option: These occur in flashbacks, replaying what would be the actions of the previous individual.
  • Surprise Party: A dark version occurs in Barbara's story when the surprise party guests turn out to be monsters waiting to feast on her.
  • Swallowed Whole: Molly turns into a sea monster and eats her real self. Maybe.
  • Tear-Apart Tug-of-War: Just when young Edith is starting to find out what was the cause of the family curse, Dawn appears and attempts to take Edie's journal from her, resulting in a tug-of-war over the item that eventually gets torn apart, pages and all.
  • The End: At the end of the credits, the magnets rearrange themselves to spell out "The End"
  • Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: Molly herself becomes one of these and crawls under her own bed to eat her. Or she just imagined it in her hallucinations.
  • Tickertape Parade: Lewis imagines such a parade on the way to his Awesome Moment of Crowning.
  • Under the Sea: When Molly turns into a shark and chases down the seal. Also, to a lesser degree, in the scene where Gregory is drowning in the bathtub, he imagines himself swimming in the sea.
  • Unreliable Narrator: Some of the stories clearly have been told from unreliable perspectives.
  • The Unreveal: Edie's segment has the young Edith start reading her account of something that happened the night she (Edith) was born, which seems to be supernatural in nature. The player may well hope that this is the part where we finally find out what's up with the family curse, the disappeared Finches and the entire Big, Screwed-Up Family. No such luck, though - Dawn turns up and tears the book apart before Edith can finish it, and those questions remain unanswered.
  • We Named the Monkey "Jack": Dawn took in a stray cat and named it 'Molly.'
  • Wham Line: Two from Edith:
    • "If she'd told me there was going to be so much climbing, I never would've come when I was 22 weeks pregnant."
    • "I just want to meet you, and tell you these stories myself. But I guess if you're reading this, things didn't work out that way."
  • Wham Shot: As if the above lines weren't enough of a giveaway, the very last shot of the game is Edith's son Christopher visiting her mother's grave, confirming she passed away from childbirth and Chris has been reading her final posthumous writings the entire time.
  • Wish-Fulfillment: In-Universe. Tired of his dead-end job at the fish cannery, Lewis dreams up an ideal world where he is the supreme king and all of his subjects adore him. Eventually, he gets so immersed in this fantasy that he stops wanting to leave.
  • Womb Level: The final level of the game, where Christopher is born and Edith herself dies.
  • You Can't Fight Fate: Walter, who believes deeply in the curse and tries to survive it. He does this by sitting in an underground bunker doing absolutely nothing for 30 years. When the boredom finally becomes too much for him, he smashes the rear wall with a sledgehammer and breaks out just so he can finally see the sun again. He is immediately run over by a train.

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Sam takes a pee

Sam takes a pee in the woods and Dawn photographs it.

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5 (2 votes)

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Main / NatureTinkling

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