HomeNewsWhat Remains of Edith Finch
“Disturbing but also fascinating”, hints Giant Sparrow founder
Image credit:Giant Sparrow / New York Times
Image credit:Giant Sparrow / New York Times
What Remains Of Edith Finchis 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 alsoa 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.
While the project has yet to be formally announced, Giant Sparrow’s founder and director Ian Dallas has shared a little about its wiggly inner workings with theNew York Times. There’s also a smidgeon of info onthe developer’s blog- the URL suggests the project’s working title is “Heron” - according to which Giant Sparrow are “drawing inspiration from places like Ico,Windosill, Spirited Away, and David Attenborough nature documentaries, along with the spirit of early animators like Winsor McCay and Walt Disney who used (for the time) cutting edge technology to build something that didn’t feel technical at all but instead felt weirdly alive.”
If the project takes inspiration from nature documentaries, it also takes inspiration from Dallas’s disappointment about nature documentaries. He feels they’re often rather broad and superficial, with too much cutting between creatures and places. “They work in part because it’s like a distraction for a toddler,” he told the NYT. Careful, Dallas, I hear David Attenborough’s got a mean left hook for a guy his age.
Image credit:Giant Sparrow / New York Times
That said, part of the aim here is simply “to call out just how weird biology is” and encourage reflection on “how many bizarre things are going on around us all the time”, rather than weaving a fairytale.
They’re also aiming for a more “exploratory and playful” world, with Dallas commenting that “single-player games often feel like a chess board - a world that’s highly predictable and entirely designed to facilitate the limited set of actions a player is capable of.” Here’s a work-in-progress example of an in-game scenario: trying to coax a giraffe into coming over and lowering its head at the right angle, so that you can put something on it.
Long story short, Giant Sparrow’s new game is a real blend of emotions, which is just how I like my emotions, personally. Going beyond the constraint of the nature documentary format, I’d love to know if the developers have thought about how their design expertise and experience may have structured their ideas about nonhuman creatures in advance.
I’m also interested to know whether the animals in the game are portrayed as passive, with the player making choices that progress the simulation, and whether there will be any interrogation of biology as a knowledge-making discipline. I have a lot of questions, yes.
Beyond that, I definitely get a Jeff Vandermeer/New Weird vibe from all this. It sounds a bit like the up-market version of the recentZoochosis, in which you’d best avoid getting too cosy with the giraffes. Incidentally, if your first thought on seeing the chicken house was “I want one”, maybe check outReka.
