“…in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.”
—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Outside of video games, my other biggest hobby is reading. Comics have taken up most of my reading time in the past months, but I will always love fiction. The stories told, the characters come to life, the craft of writing a compelling novel has always enthralled me. One of my favorite genres of fiction is Magical Realism, which blends mundane life with fantastical events. It is a genre that leads itself extremely easily to fascinating, beautiful, and heartbreaking stories and seems like it would be such a great fit for video games. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how well video games could embrace Magical Realism ever since I played What Remains of Edith Finch.
An indie walking sim, What Remains of Edith Finch stood out from the crowded genre by offering a variety of small, brief gameplay sections. The game focuses on Edith Finch, the last living member of the Finch family, who are proclaimed to be the most unlucky family in the world. She has returned to her ancestral home to discover the secrets of her family that have eluded her for so long. I was immediately struck by the outrageous architecture of the Finch home and the narrative text floating in the air for the player to read. But I did not realize the game took inspiration from Magical Realism stories until the first gameplay section where you play as Molly, Edith’s Grandmother, as she turns into various animals and hunts for food. When I finished the game, I immediately looked up if there was anything from the developer saying they were inspired by Magical Realism stories—in particular A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez—and, according to a 2017 Eurogamer article, my assumptions were correct on both accounts. I will get to the similarities between What Remains of Edith Finch and A Hundred Years of Solitude in a bit, but first I should explain what the term “Magical Realism” means in the terms of writing.
As a genre, Magical Realism is a bit fuzzy to define. I’ve read multiple books and essays trying to pin down exactly what Magical Realism is and is not, but scholars cannot seem to decide on one solid definition. The easiest way to describe it is that it’s a genre where the impossible can happen in the mundane, real world. What sets it apart from the fantasy and science genres are a few caveats. The “magic”—anything impossible, unnatural, or extraordinary—is most often not explained, it is generally accepted by the characters in the story as real and not often questioned, and it is not clandestine. Books like science fiction, which tries to explain or base its fantastic elements on real world science, and the Harry Potter series, which keeps its witches and wizards separate and hidden from the normal world, would not be considered Magical Realism. While Magical Realism stories existed before Márquez, it was his novel A Hundred Years of Solitude that thrust the genre into public attention.
As I said before, What Remains of Edith Finch and A Hundred Years of Solitude have a lot in common. Both are a generational story revolving around the hardships of a single family—both families are even headed by a elderly matriarch who seems to have outlived her natural lifespan—but while the Buendía family of A Hundred Years of Solitude is doomed to repeat the past over and over again, the curse that haunts the Finch family is a much more nebulous thing. The most the game says about the curse afflicting the Finch family is that it makes them considered the most unlucky family in the world, but it seems to relate to the fact that every member of the family dyes in unexpected and tragic ways. The player is expected to take this curse as a real force affecting the family, not imaginary or simply superstition. Every story and related gameplay section the player discovers throughout the game relates to the last moments that character spent alive. There is a sense of a desire to escape in every family member—escape their problems, their family, and the house they all call home.
The Finch house is a great setting and another similarity between the game and A Hundred Years of Solitude. Spacious and filled with secret passages, it is a joy to explore. There is a lopsided tower jutting to the sky out of the home where the family haphazardly built additional rooms for the growing family. While the Buendías never built a rickety tower, the ancestral home in the novel is under constant construction and expansion as the family grows. The fact that the Finch house looks the exact same as when Edith and mother left years ago is another bit of unreality in the game. It’s not just that the home looks the same or that everything is in the places they were left—literally nothing seems to have changed. There is no dust in the home and nothing appears to have aged at all. It is a detail that is never really mentioned in the game, but one that caught my attention at once. All the bedrooms in the Finch house have been sealed up by Edith’s mother. While this is a more outrageous than magical detail in the story, it helps heighten the strange, unworldly nature of the home while remaining true to the narrative’s more grounded nature. Edith says her mother sealed off the rooms to try to forget about the past, about the tragedy and death that has haunted the family for generations. By gaining access to these rooms and discovering the secrets of her own family, Edith will finally understand the true scope of the Finch curse.
There are moments where What Remains of Edith Finch breaks with the standard walking sim formula and lets the player experience little bite-sized bits of gameplay. These moments are when Edith is reading—whether it be a dairy, comic book, letter, etc.—about her family. All of these sections show the last moments of the relative’s life, but also reveal the entire family’s history to Edith in a very similar way that Melquíades’ scrolls reveal the history of the Buendía family to Aureliano. These are also the moments where the marvelous come to the surface of the story. These moments range from a little girl being sent to bed without supper turning into different animals to hunt for food, an artist painting a door on a canvas and stepping through it, to an infant using some sort of telekinesis to move a frog around the bathtub. These stories are effective, both as gameplay sections and as a work of Magical Realist fiction, because they ask the player to take them as not just stories, but real and true.
Magical Realism as a genre places a lot of emphasis and importance on stories, be it myths, folktales, superstitions, or confused memories. It is a genre that inherently understands and explores the gray haze between facts and truth. So in What Remains of Edith Finch, when I was reading a pulp horror comic book detailing the disappearance of Barbara, I took that as the truest recounting of her fate. When I played through Lewis’s section that shows his need to escape the mundanity of his work through his imagination growing more vivid, I believed a part of him ended up in lands of Wonder. Milton will forever remain lost because the door he painted to escape was as real as the paints he made to create.
But there is a wrinkle to all of this, a common wrinkle that hangs off stories of this nature. It is a debate that many insist on having over and over again and write fan theories of and it’s one that I frankly don’t have much patience for. What if it’s all in the characters’ head? Molly is shown to eat mistletoe berries, which are poisonous, before she transforms and goes on the hunt. Could that not be a hallucination of a fevered mind? The scene with the infant is shown through their eyes and could be an overactive imagination. There is no evidence that Milton and Barbara didn’t just run away from the family and the home. There is as much evidence that there is nothing actually magically happening in the game, but I choose to believe that everything shown to the player is real for a few reasons. First being that there is nothing to explain the family cure, which is always presented as a real force at work against the family and one that the player sees the direct result of time and time again. Second, as mentioned before, the developer has cited works of Magical Realism as huge inspirations. And third, if there is nothing magical happening in the game, then it just becomes less interesting, more bleak and dour to me. If none of the stories can be trusted as real, then nothing in the game can be trusted as real. Explaining everything as psychotic episodes from the character robs the whole game, pardon the pun, of all the magic it has.
After completing What Remains of Edith Finch, I went online to see if there were other games that would be considered Magical Realist, but I couldn’t find many. Life is Strange seemed to be the most well known game in the genre, but I’ve never played it so I wouldn’t be able to say. At the recent Playstation Showcase, Sony showed off a game called Tchia that looks like it establishes itself in the genre so I’m interested in that when it comes out. But other than that, I couldn’t really find any solid contenders. But why is that? Why are video games not taking inspiration from Magical Realism when it could be used to tell such unique and interesting stories? I really don’t have a good answer, honestly. Maybe it’s because the conventions and tropes of standard fantasy and sci fi are more easily understood and digested by the masses. With video games being such a time-intensive and expensive medium to work in, many AAA developers seem deathly allergic to anything that doesn’t have much wide appeal. Magical Realism is still a relatively new genre in the world of literature, and not a very well-known one at that still. It would make sense then that game developers have read more fantasy and sci fi compared to Magical Realism and just want to tell stories in those genres. I really can’t say, but I love to see more video game stories blend the world of the mundane with the outrageous, the surprising, and the magical.
Atomic Bob-Omb 