Any event can be a near-death experience if you allow it to be
an excerpt from a new book about What Remains of Edith Finch
Guest Post by
. I’ve actually known Caleb for—good lord—over 15 years! He’s great! I’ve been a fan of his writing for a long time, but he’s also just a very funny and kind person. Follow him on substack and twitter. Then go buy his new book!If you’d like to submit your own writing for a future Guest Post, please see the post here.
Video games are real. Their worlds and the characters that populate them are, as far as our brains are concerned, just as real as, say, the price of tomatoes and eggs.
It's reasonable then that a video game can be a catalyst for serious introspection in the way that travelogs or memoirs have traditionally been seeded. Fiction is a playground for the mind to tease out the norms of cultures we can't otherwise meet. Video games can introduce us to our new favorite places and people.
What Remains of Edith Finch, released in 2017, is responsible for introducing me to a place and to people that have changed me, changed me in the way near-death experiences change a person. That’s why I decided to write my book Suddenly I was a Shark!: My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch.
I want more video game travelogs in the world. I want more stories of people who see video games as important landmarks in their lives and are willing to be a bit vulnerable for a hungry reader. I want more books like Michael W. Clune’s Gamelife: A Memoir, like David Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld, like Ken Baumann’s Earthbound.
Suddenly I Was a Shark! My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch is what I want to see more of in the world. It's a small slice of the game’s development, a small slice of the game’s historical importance, but mostly a big slice of the game’s impact on my own life. It’s my contribution to video games; my “thank you” to an art form that has changed me.
The following two chapters are from early in the book. If you've never played What Remains of Edith Finch, you only need to know this: Edith Finch is the playable character and is pregnant with her son. Edith has reason to believe that she might not live long enough to raise Christopher herself, so she keeps a journal for her unborn son so that when he is born, he can read all about the strange history of his family. I liked this idea of writing to Christopher, of being an epistolary parent-figure, so I did a bit of the same. I hope you like it.
One: On the Path
“As a child, the house made me uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t put into words...”
-Edith Finch
Edith Finch stands on the estate side of a padlocked chain-link gate. The fence’s top rail behind her has bent to the weight of her body where she had heaved herself over. Surmounting this shaky fence could not have been easy.
She faces down a winding asphalt path toward the home that she and her mother escaped from seven years ago. The asphalt is buckled and broken; the world below has refused to settle during those empty years. Tree roots have rippled the ground. Ivy reclaims the wooden barrier lining the path like it’s trying to rip down this safety measure, to make any intruder’s journey a dangerous one. But Edith would not have returned if danger worried her.
Edith is the lone surviving member of the Finch family, following 11 deaths beginning with her Great-great-grandfather, Odin. She’s returned here to her childhood home, following her own mother’s recent passing, to learn the truth of these strange deaths, to learn if what her Great-grandmother Edie claimed is true: the Finch family is cursed.
This asphalt path she’s on leads to many things. For the Giant Sparrow development team, this path at the start of their game What Remains of Edith Finch leads to a 2018 BAFTA Award for Best Game, a NAVGTR Award for Best Original Adventure Game, a SXSW Gaming Awards award for Excellence in Narrative, a 2017 The Game Awards award for Best Narrative, and a slew of nominations. For gamers it leads to either the epitome of an underappreciated gaming genre or it leads to further evidence of an over-appreciated one. For me—an author of several books of fiction—it changes my entire understanding of the power of story. And it will change you, too, as it has so many players. Jimmy Fallon, Saturday Night Live alumnus and host of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, says of the game, “it’s one of my favorite things … it’s gonna change your life.”
But for 17-year-old Edith Finch, the path leads to her childhood home, tucked away within the sublime forests along the coasts of America’s Pacific Northwest. This is a world of vagabonds and misfits. This is a world of hope and death. This is a world where trees and cliffs meet, each offering opposing options for escape. A tree points optimistically upward into open sky while a cliff offers a fall downward into the sea. The Finch home itself, then, is a limbo trapped between exits.
There are no shops out here. No schools. No neighbors. Only one restaurant, a Chinese takeout, delivers this far outside proper civilization. But the woods, though they are forever patient, are unquestionably alive. “The woods around the house have always been uncomfortably silent,” Edith says as I guide her along the path from the padlocked gate to her empty childhood home. “As though they are about to say something but never do.”
Breathtaking, you could call it; Edith’s world is one that threatens to take your breath just as it has taken the breath of Edith’s family.
What Remains of Edith Finch is set in a house framed by trees that are themselves framed by the Pacific Northwest’s cruel geography. This region’s reputation for awe is in full force here, guiding me forward toward Edith’s house despite persistent unease.
Creative Director Ian Dallas wanted What Remains of Edith Finch to give the player a feeling of the sublime, of being stricken by beauty while also fearful of it. The game’s setting certainly primes the story for the sublime. Its geography and citizenry clash and complement to create a uniquely alluring world. Portland, Oregon author Katherine Dunn once identified the Pacific Northwest as a place of misfits, reasoning that those who want to escape their hometowns for a better life travel west and then migrate north for its cheap cost of living. To Chuck Palahniuk, a fellow Portland author, she said “we just accumulate more and more strange people. All we are are the fugitives and refugees,” which gave Palahniuk the title of his 2003 Portland, Oregon travelogue, Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon.
Parts of the Pacific Northwest still today maintain a reputation for a vagabond culture that proudly rejects homogeneity while proclaiming acceptance. This is a land where mainstream narratives are met with suspicion. Pacific Northwest native Kurt Cobain, of the band Nirvana which popularized Seattle grunge music for the world in the early 1990s, famously rejected the rockstar flamboyance narrative of preceding generations. “There is nothing in the world I like more than pure underground music,” Cobain told Sassy in April of 1992. “Pure” and “underground” are anathema to the then-popular adornments of mainstream success: machismo, big hair, and pyrotechnic stage shows. That same year Nirvana’s song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” won an MTV Video Music Award, one of the highest honors given by the once-dominant television channel and arbiter of popular music. The song title etched into the award placard misspells “Teen” as “Team.” This error surely didn’t change Cobain’s opinion of the mainstream.
As an angsty teenager, I loved what Nirvana embodied despite Cobain dying and the group having disbanded before I reached those teenage years. I felt trapped in my small town in Kansas, and I looked to the Pacific Northwest as a land of compatible souls. But even when I graduated high school and applied to universities, I never considered an actual move to the West. I felt comfortable keeping that world at arm’s length. I was shaped by the lyrics of a dead man, but I was unwilling to tempt the world that had shaped him. In that way, Edith is much braver than I am. The world she’s returning to is armed and eager to shape her, and she’s ready for it.
From the padlocked gate, I look toward the path’s end. At the top of this hill in the center of the forest, cropped at the center of the player’s screen, a cathedral-like spire juts from the horizon. It’s rejected by the surrounding world. An expunged poison. A final breath from a dying Earth. Pus from a popped zit. This is my destination. This misshapen, confusing, and unsafe structure—obviously unsafe even from this distance of several hundred feet—was Edith’s home just seven years ago.
From this distance, the house’s strange construction could be the product of a weary believer driven by an impatient god to hastily construct an idol. Or it could equally be the purposeful work of a craftsman inspired by the fantastical logic of a Rube Goldberg machine. After numerous playthroughs, I’m still not sure which is more accurate.
One thing is for sure: the impossible house is intoxicating. So, I do the only thing the game allows me to do at this point. I walk toward the house. Slowly. The world slumbers as I shift along the path before me. A slow walk, as it turns out, is a great way to turn the world itself into an epiphany.
Dear Christopher #1
Dear Christopher,
I’m sorry to hear about your mother. Edith was a wonderful person. I hope you don’t blame yourself for what happened. Sometimes … sometimes birth is a tricky thing.
Personally, I think birth is overrated. Birth is confusing and nasty and long and boring. It takes years before a person even knows they’ve been born. What a waste of time. Death, though … death changes a person. Death is powerful. Death is so strong a force that even almost-death changes a person.
2008, when I fell asleep at the wheel, driving my family home from a Thanksgiving dinner at my mother’s house, I awoke weightless, mid-air. That almost-death changed me.
High School, I led my grade-school sister, her hand in mine, across thin ice over a deep pond, with temperatures barely cold enough to register visible breath. I was responsible for her life, but I was too stupid to know it. I can still hear the ice crack with every one of my steps, and with every one of her much, much tinier steps. Mere hours later, the ice had completely melted away. Me and my baby sister should be dead. That vanishing ice changed me.
Elementary School, following a comedy & music variety show at the Burlington Opry, I remember the unseasonable humidity in the air, the hot smell of burst tire rubber, the weighty creak of my friend’s family van as it rocked off an ill-placed jack, the heavy thunk as the van crashed against the concrete, and the heat … I can still feel the heat of the van chassis against my eleven-year-old face as the van settled just centimeters above my forehead. I just wanted to know what the underside of a van looked like. I didn’t mean to kick the jack. That van changed me.
Psychologists call this a flashbulb memory. During moments of high stress, the brain opens itself up to more stimuli than normal. The brain awakens; it becomes hyper impressionable. Insatiable, even. Hungry for the world around it. You have no control. Whether or not I want to remember the sound of my friend in the distance, laughing as the van settles, that’s not up to me. My brain took over.
The brain, when it wants, will eat the world around you.
But it is possible to trick your brain, to prime your brain for a feast. Imagine, looking back on any moment in your life, any event, any story, and feeling the same life-affirming dread as I did when that 1991 tan and brown Dodge passenger van settled against my idiot eleven-year-old face.
2019, I met your mother, your uncles, your grands and great-grands and great-great-grands, and I saw them die. And every one of them was my own almost-death. I asked my brain to eat, and so it did.
So, sure, your mom died. But, for what it’s worth, without her death I wouldn’t be nearly as alive as I am today.
Every story can be your own almost-death, your own brain feast, if only you agree that it can be.
Walk with me…
Your friend,
Caleb
Suddenly I Was a Shark! My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch can be purchased in a number of ways. Visit the author’s website for a full list of options including:
Paperback, unsigned (via Amazon)
Paperback, signed (directly from the author)
Kindle
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NOOK
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Thank you so much for posting this excerpt from my newest book, but also for the kind words about me being funny and kind. That's funny and kind of you to say.
Great work Caleb.
“What Remains of Edith Finch, released in 2017, is responsible for introducing me to a place and to people that have changed me, changed me in the way near-death experiences change a person.”
This is the best reminder I’ve seen that I really need to play this game. It’s been sitting on my Steam Deck for a year.
It’s short right, like a few hours? I may play it this weekend.