What Remains of Edith Finch was a surprise best game winner at the Bafta Games awards on Thursday night. The indie release had been nominated in several other categories, but its top prize victory was such a shock that its creative director, Ian Dallas of Giant Sparrow, claimed not to have prepared a speech. “I wrote a speech for all the other awards, but this one I figured there would be something in Japanese,” Dallas told the BBC, a joke referring to Nintendo, which dominated elsewhere with Super Mario Odyssey and the stunning The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game so all-encompassing it seems to have the special ability of making time disappear.
Edith Finch is a remarkable little game, though to call it little is, perhaps, to do it a disservice. It is short, at two to three hours (and as a result, relatively cheap), but it is vast in its imagination, scope and literary ambition. Dallas has spoken before of the influences behind this eerie and beautiful story of a girl returning home to explore the history of her cursed family, citing HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe and particularly Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as reference points.
I’m not a hardcore gamer, by any stretch; I’m happy to dip into the blockbusters to see what all the fuss is about, but it usually stops there. Last week, I visited Power Up! at the Science Museum in London, as part of the city’s games festival, and it lets you have a go on a collection of consoles from the early 80s to the present day. As fun as it was to play a plodding Ultimate Warrior on the Sega Megadrive for the first time since the early 90s, it also highlighted the astonishing scale of innovation that has taken place over the last four decades.
Edith Finch’s underdog victory is not only satisfying for its giant-toppling quality, but for its part in the ongoing revision of how storytelling can take place. Before it, I had been genuinely moved by a game only once before, after a winter of slowly playing The Last of Us, eventually being forced to face that gut-wrenching ending. This game had an even greater emotional depth and had the feel – deliberately so, according to Dallas – of an accomplished short story collection.
Giant Sparrow is currently in the “very early” stages of developing its next game, but at a recent panel, it revealed its intentions. “Our next game is about the enchanting beauty of animal locomotion,” read a slide. Of course it is.
• Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist
