I've just finished playing What Remains of Edith Finch and am pleased to say that
I loved it.
While it might be a touch short for $20, it was a touching experience that I'll remember
for a long time.
The game reviewed well overall and yet it will almost certainly get overlooked in the
major game of the year award discussions.
And I can't really argue with that.
In a year that has seen games such as Persona 5, Horizon, NieR: Automata, Nioh, and another
boring looking, yet critically acclaimed, Zelda game, it's hard to make a case for
a two hour walking simulator.
And yes, I'm going to use the term "walking simulator" for the rest of this video because
I can't be bothered to use the term 'first person narrative experience' 65 times.
And a quick head's up, this video will include major spoilers for What Remains of Edith Finch,
Gone Home, and The Stanley Parable, and also includes footage and discussion of Virginia,
Firewatch, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture.
You really should play What Remains of Edith Finch without spoilers, so if you haven't
played it yet then I thoroughly recommend you go and do that.
If you need further convincing, there is a written review on my website which is linked
to in the description.
I gave the game 5 stars.
Discussion around walking simulators is nothing new at this point, and yet we still can't
even decide if they are truly games at all, which is where the 'narrative experience'
description comes into play.
This makes them incredibly hard to review.
Video game critics are used to breaking down a game into topics such as graphics, sound,
gameplay, and perhaps story, however gameplay has historically taken precedence with the
other factors rounding out and complementing the experience.
It's easy to imagine a game with inferior graphics, lackluster sound, and no story,
still being critically acclaimed.
One of those games will scoop loads of awards this year.
It's much harder to think of a game being well received solely for its story or graphics.
People like to argue that The Witcher 3 is overrated because while it has a strong story
and looks pretty, the gameplay is fairly basic.
Sure, the combat could pack a little more punch, but I'd argue that even the biggest
skeptic would have to admit it's not actually bad.
Walking simulators tend to look pretty and the sound is usually competent or occasionally
phenomenal, however the gameplay is typically limited to slow movement and the occasional
button press.
With that being true, you'd expect reviewers to run through those sections quickly and
then focus most of their critique on the story.
Except walking simulators aren't really trying to tell stories; they're trying to
make you feel something.
Even though most walking simulators last as long or longer than the average movie, if
you stripped out all the story from the average walking simulator, then you'd be left with
a short story at best.
Take Gone Home for example.
At the start of the game, Katie arrives home to her family house to find it abandoned.
She then explores the house and collects her sister's diary entries to build up a better
understanding of what happened to her family.
The diary entries might take a couple of hours to find, but you could read through them all
in five minutes easily.
There's a bit of environmental storytelling as well.
For example, Katie's father makes a living writing reviews for electronics but is writing
a novel in his spare time.
There's also some dark stuff like her Mom's potential interest in someone from work and
her father's abuse as a child.
However, these stories feel like a distraction from the main story.
Without wanting to disparage the game too much, Gone Home is is a short and simple love
story focusing on Katie's sister.
Similarly, in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, you walk around an empty English village and
listen to snippets of everyday life before the rapture.
This takes hours thanks to the incredibly slow pace of the game, however if you added
all the conversations together it wouldn't be much more than ten minutes, if that.
It's not fair to say that walking simulators aren't trying to tell a story, however I
think it's fair to say that's not the main goal.
Walking simulators are trying to make you think and feel, which is of course an incredibly
difficult thing to do in a predictable way.
Even big budget games attract a wide range of review scores from the major publications
and players and that's for games with far more measurable elements for success.
I'm not going to dwell on the whole objective vs subjective thing, but I'd argue that
some factors are more consistently rated across the board than others.
Graphics are a touch more objective than gameplay which is probably more objective than story.
That all pales in comparison to how a game makes the player feel, which is surely the
least measurable part of the entire experience.
Eliciting strong emotions from a player is much more than just having a solid story with
a sad ending.
You can't just kill a dog at the end and make everyone cry.
You need characters that people care about and relate to, and those characters need to
interact with events in a believable way in the context of the game and how the player
decides to play the game.
I'm critical of storytelling in video games because so often it feels like developers
don't even nail the basics.
There's a reason stories told through books or movies have a well established three act
structure.
Games need to do a better job of following this model, however developers also need to
worry about tutorials and player choice which tends to derail the structure.
It's harder to tell a story in video games, but when done right, the experience is arguably
better than you can get in any other medium.
Mass Effect: Andromeda is a great example of how not to tell a story, but I've already
talked about that in detail in a separate video.
Fallout 4's story is so bad in the context of the game it should be studied by developers
as a nightmare scenario to avoid at all costs.
If you're interested, there's a section in my Andromeda video where I put forward
a few ideas for how I would have done the story in Andromeda, just to make it clear
that it is completely possible to tell stories in long games.
It's often easy to break down a story and figure out why it doesn't work, but it's
harder to pinpoint something as inherently variable as the feelings experienced by the
player.
Despite this incredible level of subjectivity, I do believe there is a reason why some walking
simulators make you feel emotional and others don't.
In other words, there is a secret ingredient for success.
Assuming I've figured out how to do it in Premiere Pro, you should now see a table of
the eight walking simulators I played to completion in the last two years or so, together with
the metacritic averages for those games and what I would have scored the game.
Where Metacritic has different scores for different consoles, I've taken the average.
I've not counted the reviews for the re-release of Dear Esther because there are nowhere near
as many reviews for that version as the other games on this list.
There's two interesting things to note from this table.
First, my own personal ranking of these games is almost identical to the Metacritic ranking,
except I would switch Everybody's Gone to the Rapture with Virginia.
Second, there is very little variance in the metacritic averages for games that I believe
vary drastically in terms of quality.
The difference between the top and the bottom is just 14 points.
For context, the difference between Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect Andromeda is 23 points and
that's for games in the same series.
If you compare a bad first person shooter like, say, Homefront: Revolution to a highly
regarded one then you're looking at a difference of 45 percentage points.
Let's discuss the ranking of these games first.
Even allowing for differing opinions, I'd wager that most people would order these games
in a similar fashion.
Looking at metacritic averages is far from a perfect way of assessing a game's quality,
however generally the better games float to the top and vice-versa.
This isn't an ideal way to assess the games but it is better than me just saying "here's
a list of walking simulators in my order of quality and don't you dare argue."
Looking at these averages, the top three games are closely bunched and then there is a five
point drop to Firewatch and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and then a four point drop
to Everybody's Gone to the Rapture.
As I mentioned, I happen to think Virginia is a little better than where it sits on this
list, however probably not by a lot.
The top three games on this list stand head and shoulders above the rest for a reason
and it's the same reason that the three at the bottom fall short.
What Remains of Edith Finch, The Stanley Parable, and Gone Home all take advantage of the fact
that they are video games and use a basic set of controls to integrate the player into
the mindset of a character experiencing a story.
I'm aware that sounds blindingly obvious and yet the bottom three walking simulators
forget that they're games and don't have the same impact on the player as a result.
What Remains of Edith Finch and The Stanley Parable are the best examples of using basic
controls to integrate a player into the experience through the mindset of a character.
This is where the spoilers start coming thick and fast.
In What Remains of Edith Finch, you play as Edith Finch, returning to her childhood home
for the first time in seven years.
Edith is the last remaining member of the Finch family, with her ancestors and siblings
all dying or going missing in usual circumstances and often at a young age.
The house is locked up and all the bedroom doors are sealed.
Edith finds a way inside and begins moving from room to room, uncovering the secrets
about her family through short vignettes, usually from the perspective of the deceased
individual.
Crucially, you don't just watch the individual die, nor do you read about it.
You experience it and interact in a way that has you connect with the death more deeply
than you might have thought possible.
The best example of this is without a doubt the story of Lewis, Edith's brother.
Edith finds a letter from Lewis's psychiatrist which is read out while you play the role
of Lewis working at a cannery.
It's a boring job.
Lewis has to grab a fish, slide it under a guillotine, chop off its head, and throw the
fish away.
You do all this with the right analog stick.
You grab the fish.
Move it under the block.
Wait for the chop and then throw it away.
Rinse and repeat.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lewis finds his job boring and you as the player probably will
too.
Lewis starts daydreaming, coming up with a fantasy story about an explorer who founds
Lewistopia and sails the seas.
The player controls this fantasy story through the left stick, moving the imaginary figure
around as he gathers a band of supporters behind him and sets sail on daring adventures.
However, you have to keep chopping the fish or you won't be able to see what's going
on.
Occasionally, an actual fish blocks the path of your adventurer who won't be able to
progress until you've chopped another fish.
The player is completing a monotonous task while being far more interested in the events
of the fantasy story playing out in Lewis's head.
You are Lewis, completing the boring job but focusing on the imaginary fun.
Eventually the adventurer becomes the King.
You approach for the coronation and get ready to be crowned.
And then this happens.
You see the ending coming, but it doesn't diminish the impact.
The developer, Giant Sparrow, manages to place the player in the head of the character in
a way I'm not sure can be bettered in a ten-minute segment.
What Remains of Edith Finch contains many stories that come close to capturing this
excellence.
Gregory is playing in the bath.
You control the baby, and then a toy frog as it bounces around the bath causing chaos.
You're experiencing the magic of something as simple as playing in the bathtub from the
point of view of a baby.
And then it all goes wrong…
It would have been so easy to fade to black here, but the game goes further.
For a few short moments you stay in the head of the baby as it ends up underwater just
moments from its grim demise.
Once again, as the player, you only use the two analog sticks and one shoulder button.
It can barely be called gameplay, and yet what you're doing is so in tune with the
actions of the child that you get sucked into its head as it plays, laughs, and then dies.
I could go on.
And I will.
Another level has you playing as a child on a swing.
You're told the child always dreamt of flying and wants to make the swing go all the way
around.
With just simple back and forth movements of the analog sticks, you make the swing go
higher and higher until you eventually soar through the air, experiencing a few seconds
of blissful freedom until you plummet towards the sea.
The final story I'll discuss is that of Molly.
Molly is hungry and snacks on random food and even toothpaste.
Molly then sees a bird outside her room and wants to chase after it.
Suddenly, she becomes a cat and jumps from branch to branch chasing the bird.
After catching the bird, she becomes an owl and goes after rabbits, then a shark chasing
seals, and finally she's a snake-like monster on board a ship.
The story ends when the monster slithers into Molly's room and settles under her bed.
We have no real idea how she died.
Did a snake really crawl into her room?
Maybe the berries she ate were poisonous?
Or did she decide to climb out of the window and jump along the branches until she fell
to her death…
Falling to her death seems to be the most likely given that Molly discusses not being
allowed to climb certain trees at one point.
It doesn't really matter.
The point is that the player took part in Molly's fantasy until eventually it looped
around into her nightmare and eventual death.
What Remains of Edith Finch is full of moments like this and is without a doubt the best
walking simulator I've played for the way it makes the player contribute and become
a part of proceedings.
You can't just watch a playthrough; you have to experience it.
The Stanley Parable is a close second.
You play as an office drone who moves through life while a narrator describes and occasionally
influences Stanley's and the player's actions.
The player never does anything complicated or challenging, but when you start your second
playthrough you realize just how incredible an experience it is.
Early in the game, Stanley approaches two doors and the narrator says something like
"Stanley chose the door on the left."
I therefore went into the left door without even thinking about it.
On a second playthrough, I started going against these subtle attempts to control me and tried
to break the narrative as much as possible.
The Stanley Parable wants you to think about free will and it does that by making you control
a character who is trying to exert free will.
The connection is obvious, but no less powerful for it.
Gone Home might initially seem like an outlier.
You essentially just move around a house and collect diary entries.
There doesn't seem to be the connection between the player and the character that
I've described as being important.
Except there is.
As Katie, you enter a dark and empty house, with no idea where your family has gone.
The Fullbright Company builds on this suspense by showing your father as a troubled and ultimately
unsuccessful writer with a possible drinking problem.
Your sister's diary entries sound increasingly troubled as she eventually reveals she has
a girlfriend but is worried about what the future holds for the two of them.
Everything the player discovers feels like it's building towards a dark conclusion
as you enter the attic at the end of the game.
The game delivers a final twist and ends on a happy note which comes as a huge relief
after ninety minutes of tension while creeping around a dark house.
Unlike The Stanley Parable and What Remains of Edith Finch, Gone Home could still be enjoyed
by a disconnected viewer because the visuals alone impart a lot of the same atmosphere,
however I'd wager that people who play the game get a lot more out of it.
I don't have much to say on Firewatch.
First, it's important to note that its metacritic average would be a couple of points higher
were it not for a buggy PS4 release that by itself only got a 77.
Second, Firewatch does most of the things I talked about with the previous three games,
just not as well.
The player is a park ranger in the mountains, using a map and compass to get around and
investigating suspicious activities and government officials.
While it might sound like you're just walking around, the level of freedom is a crucial
part of the immersive gameplay because you can get lost, especially if you turn off the
markers and just rely on your compass and map.
I'm talking from experience on that front.
It might be occasionally frustrating, but it helps you feel like a park ranger in an
area he doesn't know well.
Once again, the actions are limited, but suitable for the character you're portraying.
Instead of finding diary entries, you find clues and slowly figure out what is going
on.
It's biggest flaw is the ending.
Firewatch sets up a big mystery and then throws it out the window in the final act.
I'm sure some reviewers deducted points for this ending.
I know I would have done.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is the game that nearly made me think this entire thesis
was a load of bollocks, which I'm sure some of you are also thinking.
Its score is the same as Firewatch, but not held back by a buggy release.
In The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you play as an occult detective called Paul Prospero
who is investigating the disappearance of, you guessed it, Ethan Carter.
You find clues and then try to piece them together to recreate what happened at each
murder scene.
In theory you are playing as a detective and you solve cases, so it should be immersive.
Except there are two problems.
First, there are large puzzle elements to The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and getting
stuck can prove frustrating.
Unlike in Firewatch, I didn't feel like getting stuck on the puzzles was part of the
experience.
As a puzzle game, this is obviously not a problem, however as a walking simulator, it
does deteract from the experience somewhat.
Second, while you could argue that the player's ability to examine clues and watch crimes
happen after they've taken place is consistent with being an occult detective, it feels like
the gameplay mechanic was devised first, and then Paul's ability with the occult was
added to explain it for the player.
This story never got its hooks into me.
Now let's look at the three games sat at the bottom of the Metacritic table: Virginia,
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and Dear Esther.
They all have one thing in common; the limited gameplay mechanics do not do enough to immerse
you in the character you're supposed to be playing.
In the case of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, I'm not even sure who the character you're
supposed to be playing is.
These three games are all interactive stories in much the same way that a book is interactive.
You have to turn the pages to continue the story, but you'll only get immersed if the
quality of the writing is strong enough to stand on its own.
The experience of turning the pages doesn't add anything or bring you into the world in
and of itself, much like moving a character around and listening to conversations doesn't
add anything.
I don't have any footage of Dear Esther so I won't talk about it separately.
In terms of the way the game plays out, it's almost identical to Everybody's Gone to the
Rapture anyway.
In Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, you play as an unknown person in an English village
in 1984.
The village is beautifully rendered and for someone who used to visit places like this
as a kid, it's almost impossibly familiar and nostalgic to behold.
It certainly ticks the graphical immersion box.
I also want to give a shout out to the incredible score by Jessica Curry, who also worked on
Dear Esther.
However, there's little gameplay to speak of and certainly no attempt to immerse you
into a character.
As I mentioned, you don't even know who you are and if it weren't for sections where
you climb a fence, I'd wonder if you were even a person at all.
All you do is move around the village chasing flickers of light and occasionally stopping
to listen to conversations that hint at the impending rapture and what might have caused
it.
It's hard to care.
You never see anyone beyond pictures or shapes of light, so there's no chance to get invested
in secondary characters either.
The rapture has already happened, so the tension doesn't ramp up as you move around the village.
You might argue that this all sounds a lot like Gone Home and I admit the difference
isn't huge; however it is significant.
In Gone Home, you play as a character alone in a dark house who has to explore the house
to find out what happened to her family.
You as the player have the same goals and the limited interaction is enough for you
to act as the character would as she uncovers the story.
At the beginning of the game, the character is tense and so is the player.
This tension builds until the ending when both player and character relax.
In Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, you also want to unravel the mystery, but you're
not acting as the unknown character.
You follow around lights because that's what you've been told to do.
You might as well be one of those lights yourself for all the difference it would make.
Ultimately, the experience of watching someone play Everybody's Gone to the Rapture will
be exactly the same as you'd get from playing it yourself.
The game lives and dies by its story and the story here simply isn't good enough.
It would likely be a phenomenally short game if it weren't for the glacial movement speed,
which I suspect is the reason why you are forced to move so slowly.
Either that, or the frame rate wouldn't hold up, which I admit is a possibility.
Virginia has similar problems to Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, I just happen to believe
that the story is more intriguing and leaves the player with more to think about.
It still offers very little in the way of interactivity but it does at least give you
a character to care about.
Virginia is a game where you move between short scenes with very little in the way of
interaction from the player.
That might sound a lot like Firewatch, but there's a crucial difference.
In Virginia, you're playing a detective, but you never do any detecting.
You move through days in the character's life but it rarely feels like you are the
character because the gameplay doesn't do enough to put you in her shoes.
In Firewatch, the gameplay made you feel like a park ranger.
Virginia never does that.
Looking at eight games and some metacritic scores isn't much of a case study, but I
believe there's something to learn from the top three games on the list.
If developers want to create an emotional walking simulator that resonates with players,
they need to do more than just have you see through the eyes of a character.
You need to play as the character with a simple but effective set of controls.
None of this is to say that a game like Virginia can't be a great experience, it just means
the story has to be that much better.
The more the experience is solely based on watching the story unfold, and less on immersing
the player into a character, the more that story has to match experiences we get elsewhere
such as in movies or books.
To me, there's a huge gap between What Remains of Edith Finch and games like Dear Esther
and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture.
I don't think they're even close in terms of quality and yet there's very little variance
in the review scores.
The very best the genre has to offer still can't reach an average of 90 and even relatively
poor games sit comfortable at 75.
While I'm sure some people will attribute the high scores for walking simulators to
hipster game reviewers or whatever disparaging description you want to use, I really don't
think that's the case.
I looked a little closer at the reviews for Everybody's Gone to the Rapture from the major
publications--I won't name them, but you know the ones.
Front page of a Google search.
Anyway, the reviews have a lot in common.
They talk about the premise of the game, which isn't much more than you are in an English
village in 1984 and everyone has disappeared in mysterious circumstances.
There's discussion of the game's visuals and sound, both of which are phenomenal.
Reviews complain about the slow pace of the game and describe the limited way in which
you as the player interact with the experience.
In other words, it's the usual graphics, sound, and gameplay parts of the review.
Reviewers then either ignore the story or say they can't talk about it because it
would all be spoilers.
And they're right.
The game lasts a few hours, but the story is nowhere near meaty enough to do any more
than introduce the main concept without getting into spoiler territory.
Compare that to reviews of movies or books.
Those reviews don't generally include spoilers, however they talk about the quality of the
writing and things like pacing, endings, structure, etc.
It's possible that game reviewers just aren't used to doing that, however they're nearly
always good writers and I don't believe the omission of that discussion is an accident.
It's primarily due to the game's lack of a story to get stuck into.
Therefore, instead of talking about the story, reviewers describe how the game made them
feel, and that wraps back around to the main discussion of this video.
How a walking simulator makes you feel is dependent on who you play as and whether you
interact with the world in a believable and simple way.
None of this explains why walking simulators don't typically get a lot of bad reviews.
They seem to range from Good to Excellent.
My theory, and it really is just a theory, is that reviewers don't typically want to
punish a game harshly for not giving them the feels, for want of a better phrase, even
if that is essentially the entire point of the game.
It feels too subjective, even in the context of the subjectivity inherent in reviews already.
It's a good idea to work through an example.
Let's say that like me, you have great taste, and think What Remains of Edith Finch is a
brilliant game.
You might not necessarily know why you think it's that good, but you know what you like.
So, you review What Remains of Edith Finch and give it a high score.
Let's say 9 out of 10.
You talk about the game with friends and maybe even do a spoilercast talking about how much
you liked it and which scenes resonated with you the most.
A few months later, another walking simulator shows up and you're asked to review it.
This time, the game doesn't click with you.
It seems similar to What Remains of Edith Finch in every way and yet you don't end
up thinking about the game afterwards.
You don't discuss it with friends.
You don't do the spoilercast.
It's nice to look at and has incredible sound and voice acting, but it just didn't
resonate with you in the same way.
So what score do you give the game?
Remember, it's technically very competent.
It lasts as long as What Remains of Edith Finch and is the same price.
In other words, how much do you punish the game for not making you as emotional as What
Remains of Edith Finch did?
Because that's essentially what you're doing.
This is why few walking simulators get bad reviews.
Critics don't feel confident enough to punish a game on something as soft as the lack of
emotion it brings out of the player.
It's easy to reward a game for giving you that experience, but harder to punish one
that doesn't.
That's how games like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture end up with lots of comfortable
sevens and eights.
As you might have guessed from my opinion on Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the
Rapture, I'm fine with walking simulators being punished if they feel flat and don't
properly immerse the player into a character through their gameplay mechanics.
If the story by itself does not stand up as a separate story--and I've not played a
walking simulator yet where the story would work on its own--then the emotional response
you get from the game's world should be weighted heavily in the score.
It might sound harsh for me to be campaigning for games to get lower review scores, however
my intention is more to help the truly great games stand out.
I don't want people to think walking simulators are all the same because if they play one
and don't like it then they might write off the entire genre.
At first glance, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture might look a lot like What Remains of Edith
Finch however there's a vast gap in the quality of those games due to the way What
Remains of Edith Finch uses basic controls to immerse you in characters as you experience
the story.
I'd hate to think of people not buying this game because other games in the genre didn't
click with them.
I'm going to say something really cliche now, but I want you to comment on this video
and let me know what you think.
I know all YouTubers say that because they want engagement on their videos and then they
proceed to ignore the comments anyway, but I genuinely do want to know whether you think
I'm right about all this, or whether I'm talking nonsense.
As you can see from my other videos, I do respond to comments, so I'm not just saying
this for the YouTube statistics.
Also, let me know if there are any walking simulators that I've not played that I might
like based on this discussion.
I don't play much on PC, but my laptop can probably handle the typical walking simulator.
This video isn't my usual thing, but I plan to do a few more random opinion pieces like
this when the ideas pop into my head.
If you liked it, I'd appreciate it you could hit the like button and perhaps consider sharing
it on social media and subscribing.
Okay, thanks for listening.
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