What Remains Of Edith Finch is a very upsetting collection of interactive short stories about the brief, tragic lives of a cursed family who live in a monstrous treehouse. It's also a wonderful show of experimentation, switching genres from story to story - one minute you're a playable bestiary on shuffle, the next you're beheading fish in a cannery as the worktable disappears beneath your scrolling daydreams. The developer's next project seems to be pursuing a similar balance of whimsy and darkness. It's another anthology experience, which casts you as a field biologist studying "the strangeness of organic life". Also, chicken-legged houses.
]]>The Steam Mystery Fest is well underway, discounting countless games about detectives, murder mysteries, or generally strange occurrences. Lots of heavy hitters have big sales like Return Of The Obra Dinn and Pentiment, but as always, you’ll need to do quite a bit of scrolling to find the hidden gems. The sales last until February 27th, so you have a week to grab some cheap games, and if you’re struggling with recommendations, here are some good’uns.
]]>If you've got Game Pass and haven't yet played What Remains Of Edith Finch, do have a go before it leaves Game Pass on August 31st. First released in 2017, it's a first-person explore-o-story about a teenager returning to her fantastical childhood home to explore lushly detailed rooms and secret passages in the hope of understanding a supposed family curse which causes tragic deaths. And what deaths! You witness many of the Finch family deaths firsthand by playing stunning dreamy vignettes, scenes which are often as wondrous as they are harrowing. Do have a go and enjoy being punched square in the heart by grief.
]]>Xbox Game Pass for PC is starting off the new year strong by adding the mysterious What Remains Of Edith Finch. It's a first-person exploration game poking round the strange, sprawling house built by the possibly-cursed Finch family over generations. It's a bit of an RPS fave, and will arrive on Microsoft's subscription service on January 14th. This is one I've been meaning to get my hands on for ages, so now I truly have no excuse.
]]>What Remains Of Edith Finch? I'm not sure it's the answer the devs had in mind when they first penned the script, but today's answer is a whole lotta assets to download for your own Unreal Engine projects. If you fancy taking remixing your own take on the Finch household, you can now download a massive bundle of models, textures, and pre-built environments for free via Epic's game development platform.
]]>If it's not baroque, don't fix it. Little architecture joke for you there, just to kick off a dry topic with a giggle. You see, appreciating architecture is for people in beige cardigans. Folks who subscribe to magazines printed on paper so thick you can still calculate the tree’s age. You know the type I mean. Spectacled couples with non-Ikea coffee tables. Thirty-year-olds. People like you! Here are 11 examples of very satisfying architecture in PC games.
]]>Alice L. was the person who really encouraged me to dive headlong into the pool of long build projects that is my fandom of The Sims 4. She is both one third of the Council Of Alices and one third of the RPS VidBud team on YouTube, and she's just started a new Sims 4-themed video series. In Can We Build It?, Alice L. attempts to build an iconic room from another game but in The Sims 4's build mode.
In this first one she's had a crack at the twins' room in What Remains Of Edith Finch, which should count as doing two rooms, really. Calvin and Sam shared a bedroom, but they had very different design sensibilities. Alice has done a really astounding job recreating it, as you'll see via the screenshots and comparisons in the video, embedded below.
]]>It's been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that's happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you, but a day's work for us. Below you'll find our picks for the 50 greatest games released on PC across the past decade.
]]>"Family is all", a wise man once said. And then he half-drowned his nephew in a bucket of ice water, but let's forget about that bit. The sentiment is what's important. Families can be good and bad, dysfunctional or helpful. This is as true in videogames as in life. So that's what we're podcasting about this week. The brothers, mothers, aunts and cousins we have grown to like or who we watch with a wary eye any time we visit the local volcano. Come listen.
]]>As an inadvertent cowboy builder whose Sims face a much greater risk from incompetence than malice, I am in awe of players who manage to build beautiful homes. Case in point, YouTuber Jess Harts has built a recreation of the sprawling, unreal family home from What Remains Of Edith Finch inside The Sims 4. Yes, the house that has a different style for every family member. The one riddled with secret passages. The one that's more metaphor than building. She's built that. All of that. In fourteen hours. It looks: wild. Come gawk at the sped-up building process.
]]>Fantastic first-person walk-o-story What Remains Of Edith Finch (don't call it a walking simulator) is free for keepsies right now on the Epic Games Store, and I highly recommend nabbing it. It's a beautiful and melancholic tale with a magical realist bent, exploring the lives and deaths of the family who've lived in a strange and lonely house for generations. It's one of the best PC games and all, says us. Epic are signing up all sorts of exclusives to get their store going, including having Ubisoft onboard with The Division 2, but little excites more than free video games.
]]>What Remains of Edith Finch has a story that will stay with you for a long time. Small tableaus of the lives of the Finch family. Much like Gone Home you start at your old family home, but this time you uncover how a lot of your family died. Cheerful, I know. However, with each new story you learn a little more about the family members you never met, or the ones you knew all-too-briefly.
]]>Family saga-based, super-darkly comic wander 'em up What Remains Of Edith Finch was one of the most memorable games I played last year, and a treasure trove of artistry and short-form storytelling. Obviously, now that it's won a BAFTA and all that, I entirely reject it as despicable mainstream trash, and if you ever hear me saying otherwise it's fake news, yeah?
Yesterday just so happened to be Edith's first birthday, and devs Giant Sparrow marked the date by sharing a whole bunch of insights into the making of their lovely game.
]]>The 14th British Academy Games Awards were handed out this week and, while the awards themselves may be a bit disconnected from where the rest of us in Games Proper see the industry, they are a good measurement of how The Establishment sees interactive entertainment at this point. To that end, it is both shocking and a bit exciting to see the awards highlight a game that was overwhelmingly overlooked this year, and which deserved more celebration than it has received to this point. I'm speaking about Ninja Theory's dark adventure fantasy game Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, and its five BAFTA wins: Artistic Achievement, Audio Achievement, British Game, Games Beyond Entertainment and Melina Juergens took the Performance category for her role as Senua.
]]>The awards ceremony at this year’s GDC was fun. At least, that’s what John told me from his seat in the crowd, where he saw the winners mount a stage some would consider too colourful for this planet. The Independent Games Festival Awards and subsequent Game Developer’s Choice Awards saw a range of trophy-grabbers, from indie students to adventure game veterans. Unfortunately for them, I was hiding backstage, skulking behind a black curtain and holding a voice recorder like a cudgel. I had one question to ask them all: If they had to give their award away, who would get it?
It’s like re-gifting, except you worked really hard for the gift and now you have to hand it over three minutes after your acceptance speech. Life is pain.
]]>The calendar's doors have been opened and the games inside have been eaten. But fear not, latecomer - we've reconstructed the list in this single post for easy re-consumption. Click on to discover the best games of 2017.
]]>We've told you about the most overlooked games and what has us excited for next year, but we haven't had a good grump yet on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. So this week the team discuss the worst games they played in 2017. John thinks the misogyny of House Party puts it firmly in the bin, and Brendan is still wiping the red dust from his eyes after woeful survival game Rokh. But Matt can't bring himself to call any game terrible, not even Star Wars Battlefront 2.
It's not all negative vibes, however. We've also been smiling at pretty and poignant Gorogoa, climbing a mountain in Getting Over It, and shooting our way through Destiny 2's Curse of Osiris expansion. We're only a bit scroogey.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
Watching walking simulators evolve from the waffling emptiness of Dear Esther into remarkable narrative adventures like Firewatch and What Remains of Edith Finch has been one of my favourite spectator sports as a games journalist. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is one of the better stepping stones on this long and winding road. It has players assume the role of psychic detective Paul Prospero, who arrives in the gorgeous Red Creek Valley on the trail of a missing boy.
]]>Let us podcast, lest we forget. The squad of the Electronic Wireless Show chat about some of the most overlooked and underappreciated games of this year. Katharine thinks head-in-a-sack trip to the underworld Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice might qualify, while Adam praises the unsettling tales of Stories Untold. Brendan just wants more people to slap in skinny-person biffing game Absolver. But we've also been playing some other good 'uns, including the magical realist family chronicle What Remains of Edith Finch and naval tactical battler Mare Nostrvm.
]]>What Remains of Edith Finch is the kind of game that makes the phrase 'visual feast' feel appropriate again, as opposed to just breathless enthusiasm for CGI battle scenes in quoted four-star reviews on superhero movie posters. There is so much wonderful and surprising detail, both ostentatious and subtle, in the rooms that make up its impossible, wonderful house of dreams and death.
So much that it's very easy to miss things that tell extra stories - the sweetest and most powerful stories, and also the stories that the Finch family told each other.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, What Remains of Edith Finch [official site].
The Finch house fits together in a jumble. The original building serves as a foundation for the floors that teeter on top and its rooms connect in strange and confounding ways, through hidden passages and external ladders. The whole thing looks like it couldn’t function as a building, a pile of timbers that’d tumble in a gale.
Yet, as I played What Remains of Edith Finch I found it making sense. Its rooms are fantastically detailed, and though their entrances can be through children’s playhouses and exits can be secret trapdoors, the game pulled me through. I was rarely confused or lost, and yet there are no quest markers or breadcrumb trails to follow. How What Remains of Edith Finch guides without pushing is simple, and yet complex. It’s all about:
THE MECHANIC: Signposting with words
]]>Update: The year is finished, which means you can now read the final list of our favourite games of 2017.
2017 has already been an extraordinary year for PC games, from both big-name AAA successes to no-name surprise indie smashes. Keeping up with so much that's worth playing is a tough job, but we've got your back. Here is a collection of the games that have rocked the RPS Treehouse so far this year.
We've all picked our favourites, and present them here in alphabetical order so as not to start any fights. You're bound to have a game you'd have wanted to see on the list, so please do add it to the comments below.
]]>EDITH FINCH SPOILERS AHEAD. THIS IS A REALLY OBVIOUS WARNING SO CONSIDER YOURSELVES WARNED!
What Remains of Edith Finch [official site] is a home exploration story – an anthology of the lives of Edith's family members – where playable vignettes tell you what happened to each of them. Each vignette is a distinct tale with its own mood, its own rules. Here I sat down with Ian Dallas and we dug deep into the story of Lewis. Without giving too much away before the jump Lewis's story is probably the star of the game – not my personal favourite, but the one which showcases just how different and accomplished these vignettes actually are in the current landscape of games. Join us as we explore the world of fish and of fairytales...
The illustrations are a mixture of concept art and screenshots from Lewis's story and can be enlarged by clicking on them.
]]>Whatever the screenshot above might have made you think, What Remains of Edith Finch [official site] doesn't have very much in common with Dear Esther at all. It has a great deal in common with a lot of games I've played, but in the end doesn't feel very much like any of them. It's a walking simulator for about ten minutes, and then it becomes all manner of other things, including one of my favourite games in years. Here’s wot I think about this extraordinary family saga.
]]>How about some family history, gang? What Remains of Edith Finch [official site] is a creepy-vibed collection of family stories from Giant Sparrow. They are the folks behind colour-it-in allegory The Unfinished Swan, which was sadly a PlayStation-only adventure - but a really good one. Happy days, then, that their new tale of uncanny architecture and animal transmogrification is coming to PC. When? April 25. I already told you that in the headline. Don’t you listen?!
]]>As Old Father Time grabs his sickle and prepares to take ailing 2016 around the back of the barn for a big sleep, we're looking to the future. The mewling pup that goes by the name 2017 will come into the world soon and we must prepare ourselves for its arrival. Here at RPS, our preparations come in the form of this enormous preview feature, which contains details on more than a hundred of the exciting games that are coming our way over the next twelve months. 2016 was a good one - in the world of games at least - but, ever the optimists, we're hoping next year will be even better.
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![קודי רכבת סטאר של Honkai [דצמבר 2024]](https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/honkai-star-rail-bronya-fu-xuan.jpg?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp "קודי רכבת סטאר של Honkai [דצמבר 2024]")
