What Remains of Edith Finch turns family deaths into playable stories — BAFTA Best Game

After The Unfinished Swan, Giant Sparrow wanted players to feel the sublime — beautiful and unsettling at once. An early scuba-diving prototype was engaging for about ten minutes, so the team rebuilt that feeling as a house of short interactive stories about a family whose members keep dying young.

Make death the playable subject: an anthology where each dead family member's last day becomes its own mini-game in its own style, and every story ends with that death.

The studio spent roughly two years prototyping isolated five-to-ten-minute experiences, letting each vignette find its own controls, art and typeface before any were linked. Players explore the Finch house as the last surviving Edith; each bedroom opens a memory, the family tree forces a pause between stories, and words inside the world frame each tale as a remembered telling.

Released in April 2017, What Remains of Edith Finch won Best Game at the 2018 BAFTA Games Awards ahead of the year's biggest AAA titles and was one of the evening's most-nominated games, giving the anthology narrative form a mainstream benchmark.

What Remains of Edith Finch is Giant Sparrow's second game, a collection of short stories about the deaths of a family, tethered together by the last remaining member of the Finch family as she explores her old family home in search of answers. Creative director Ian Dallas told GodisaGeek that the initial seed was not death at all but an attempt to explore the sublime — something simultaneously beautiful and unsettling.

The team's first version was a scuba-diving simulator built from Dallas's memory of the ocean floor sloping into darkness, which he admitted was interesting for about ten minutes but could not fill a full game. Drawing on Lovecraft, Poe and Neil Gaiman, the studio shifted focus to the experience of individuals within an overwhelming universe, and began prototyping short, emotionally loaded scenes.

Each scene is entered through a bedroom in the Finch house, and each vignette is built to put the player inside a different character's final moments with its own visual and mechanical style. Dallas described the deliberate rhythm: ease players into each story, let them be overwhelmed, then force a pause — the family tree between rooms gives players room to breathe before the next death.

The approach worked. At the 2018 British Academy Games Awards, the small US indie beat the biggest-budget, best-selling games of 2017 to take Best Game, having been among the evening's most nominated titles, and it has since become a standard reference point for narrative design in games.

The seed was an emotion — the sublime — not a genre, which freed the team to invent a form that could actually carry it.

Every death is a separate miniature game with its own controls, art and typeface, so the anthology never repeats and each relative is remembered in their own style.

Two years of isolated five-to-ten-minute prototypes let the studio test each vignette with players before committing to a linked anthology.

Because every story ends in the relative's death, the medium itself delivers the grief instead of an on-screen explanation.

When one mechanic cannot carry a feeling, split the feeling into many small worlds: a family of deaths became playable because each death got its own genre, its own rules and its own visual language.

Annapurna Interactive continued to publish and port What Remains of Edith Finch across platforms after its 2017 launch, and the game stayed a fixture of award lists and narrative-design talks. Ian Dallas went on to discuss how the industry treats story in games, telling GamesIndustry.biz after the BAFTA win that the game's creative success reflected players pushing narrative forms forward. Giant Sparrow has not made a sequel, but designers still cite Edith Finch when arguing that games can make death something to feel rather than a failure state.