His fear of the family curse was justified and although he’d managed to live past 50, the ‘monster’ was waiting for him as soon as he left. As he walked away from the house along some train tracks, into the forest, a train comes towards him and kills him, just moments after he left the bunker. After 30 years he’d had enough of the life he was leading and decided to leave and live whatever time the curse allowed him to. He thought that staying underground was the only way to protect himself, even if that meant cutting himself off from his family. However, he isn’t hiding from a monster, or any natural disaster, he is hiding from the Finch family curse, the one that already killed his brothers and sisters.
The story, told through a letter written by Walter, portrays an earthquake like shaking that he calls a monster. Edith was six when he died but she never even knew that he was living under her house all those years. After Barbara died, Walter wanted to get away from everything so built a bunker underneath the house and stayed there unseen for 30 years. Not only because of his lonely life and the way he died, but how it involved the whole Finch family. Exactly how she dies is left completely up to the player but we are offered a number of possibilities. The comic doesn’t confirm how she died, but says that the fans were after her scream and that the police had Rick as the prime suspect. Or, it could have been a masked gang that was threatening people in the area that night. It could be that the hoard of horror enthusiasts kill her in their attempts to scare her, or her boyfriend, who goes missing that night, accidentally kills her. It isn’t made clear exactly how Barbara dies. Then, many of the horror fans show up to surprise her and as they try to scare her she mysteriously dies. The attendees, including her boyfriend Rick, want to scare her so that her scream of old returns and when she returns to the Finch house to look after her younger brother Walter, Rick scares her. Suddenly, she is invited to a horror convention so that fans can hear her scream, but it isn’t the same as it once was. Barbara was a child star, famous for her scream, but as she gets older she is struggling with life away from the limelight. Her final moments are shared through a comic book, with perfectly matching creepy music and narration. However, since she was able to write about what happened to her in her diary, it is more likely that she hallucinated becoming those animals and that she died soon after writing about it.īarbara’s story is one of the best in Giant Sparrow’s game. Some other theories includes the suggestion that it was a fever dream and she died in her sleep, or that she went looking for food outside her window and fell to her death. The most likely explanation is that some of what she ate (berries, toothpaste, gerbil food) poisoned her and she began to hallucinate these strange happenings, wrote about it in her journal, and died from the effects. She returns to her room where she is writing about what has happened to her while the monster waits for her under her bed.
As she attempts to seek food, she becomes a cat that chases a bird, an owl that swoops after rabbits, a shark that hunts a seal, and a sea monster that eats people. Her death is told through her journal that Edith finds on her cupboard, and sees her locked in her room after been sent to bed without dinner. Molly’s story, the first you play in What Remains of Edith Finch, is both one of the strangest and hardest to decipher in the game. If you need any persuasion, you can read out glowing review here. If you haven’t played the whole of What Remains of Edith Finch, I would recommend playing it and returning when you have finished. I will then try to analyze the game’s ambiguous ending, so you can expect spoilers from this point onwards. She wanders around the house, one that has been built upon repeatedly over the years and looks like an image from a Tim Burton movie, reading stories about how her relatives passed away and how each of them had an impact on her own life.īeginning on the next page, I will be explaining what happens in each short tale and how each one impacts the overarching plot. Edith has returned to find out what happened to each member of her perennially unlucky family. As Edith, we return to the family home, where the Finches had lived for more than a century after their first house sank just off the shore after they emigrated from Europe. The story that Giant Sparrow has created for What Remains of Edith Finch is simple, but beautifully told.