The Unfinished Swan
Giant Sparrow’s first game, The Unfinished Swan, is similar to What Remains of Edith Finch with its gameplay style. The story follows Monroe as he is led through a mysterious world by a painted swan.
While it’s a slow paced puzzle adventure like Edith Finch, it is The Unfinished Swan’s style that makes it stand out. It’s almost all bright white, with you using paint that you can fire to solve puzzles, uncover secrets, and progress through the story. The gameplay is fun and the story is more emotional than you might expect.
You may have even noticed the Unfinished Swan easter egg in What Remains of Edith Finch. Milton’s room is covered in paint, has orange footsteps on the floor, and other hints to the studio’s first game. They even commented on the connection between Milton and The Unfinished Swan.
Gone Home
Gone Home is the darling of the walking-sim genre. Taking place in a mysterious house in the middle of a storm, it came out of nowhere as an indie masterpiece.
The aim of Gone Home is simply to explore the huge house to find clues about what happened the family that call it home, just as you do in Edith Finch, albeit in a less flashy way. At first, the flickering lights, dark corridors, and raging storm makes is seem like a horror game, but it soon opens up to become much more.
Saying anything at all about the plot would spoil it, and going in blind is the best, but you can expect a deeply emotional story that features some of the best character and voice acting work you’ll ever find. Play it all in one two hour sitting and the ending will stay with you for a long time.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is more open than the likes of What Remains of Edith Finch. The game points out early on that it will not hold your hand as you play, with you exploring the open world to solve the mystery of the deaths of the Carter family.
You have powerful abilities that allow you to analyze the scenes when you come across a dead body. There are also puzzles to solve and stealth elements that can see you fail.
It is certainly more complex than some of the other games on this list due to the world design, and the story is certainly darker, but it features all the environmental story telling and narrative focus that you’d expect from a walking-sim.
Firewatch
Firewatch, while still a walking-sim in nature, is a lot more open than What Remains of Edith Finch. As Henry, who is a fire lookout in the Shoshone National Forest, you get quite a large and beautiful area to explore.
You’re still sent to different areas as part of the story, but you get more of a chance to explore and marvel at the scenery than you do in other similar games.
While the world is great, a lot of that being down to the colors and art style used, it is the touching story that will grab you. From the start, you interact with Delilah via a walkie-talkie and your relationship with her blossoms as the scenes progress and you learn more about the setting. It’s a lovely tale of a connection in a lonely place.
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture
Dear Esther was one of the first games to incorporate the walking-sim gameplay style you saw in Edith Finch, but The Chinese Room’s follow-up, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, was a step forward.
It’s a very slow game, not only in terms of the narrative but also when it come to movement. You wander around a quaint English town, interacting with lights that reveal segments of the story.
Through recreations and radio clips, you learn all about why all the town’s inhabitants have disappeared. As you’d expect from a game with such a title, it has got quite a supernatural story, but it is deeply affecting.
After it released it won a load of narrative and design awards throughout the gaming world and has been made free to PlayStation Plus members.
Tacoma
Fullbright, the creators of Gone Home, released their second game a few years later. Tacoma’s tale is significantly more futuristic, taking place on an abandoned space station and you watch a series a recreations as you explore to get a sense of what happened to all the characters that were there.
It’s still a lot of exploring, light puzzle solving, and listening to excellent voice acting, but the environmental story telling in Tacoma is a level above anything else.
It might not have a story that emotional like Firewatch, Edith Finch, and Gone Home, but exploring the space station and learning about the characters is fascinating. Also, just like Edith Finch is can be completed in just a couple of hours, so you could play it in just one sitting in the evening.
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