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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsWhat Remains of Edith Finch draws its haunting mood from more than one source. Creative director Ian Dallas has described an early aim of evoking awe: the feeling of being small amid something beautiful, vast and difficult to understand. Memories of scuba diving and growing up in Washington state helped shape that idea; weird fiction, family stories and short-form anthology storytelling helped shape the game around it.
Its starting point was awe, not a ghost story
In a 2017 account of the game’s development, Giant Sparrow creative director Ian Dallas said the team first wanted to make a game about awe: “what it feels like to see something that’s simultaneously astonishing and overwhelming.” He pictured being at the bottom of the ocean or in the middle of a dark forest. Dallas’s PlayStation Blog article describes that emotional aim, rather than a single real-life haunting or source story.
Dallas also connected the concept to scuba diving in Washington, including the experience of seeing the ocean floor slope into darkness. Childhood memories of Washington forests contributed another version of the same scale: a child’s sense of being surrounded by something immense. In an Xbox Wire interview, he explained how familiar natural settings could ground surreal events.
The combination matters. The game’s unease grows from a world that can feel lovely and ordinary one moment, then too large or unknowable the next. Dallas described the goal as mystery and ominous uncertainty—not horror built chiefly to startle or frighten.
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Weird fiction and stories told in fragments
Writers and works the creators named
Dallas called weird fiction the team’s “biggest source of inspiration.” In a PlayStation Blog interview, he named Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, Neil Gaiman, Lord Dunsany, Jean Ray and Kelly Link. He also cited One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks, Ugetsu and Alice in Wonderland.
Giant Sparrow’s original concept document gives a more focused account of three conceptual touchstones: Lovecraft’s unknowable universe, Borges’s surrealism and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, particularly its broad family story and intimate detail. These are the studio’s stated influences, not a claim that the finished game reproduces each work’s themes or structure.
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Why the anthology form fits
The game is built as a collection of playable short stories, each following a different Finch family member at the moment of their death. The family house connects these episodes, but the way a player experiences each one changes from story to story. Dallas linked the short lead-in of a vignette—like an episode of The Twilight Zone—to the way a feeling of the sublime can work: the player is drawn quickly into a distinct perspective.
He also pointed to the intimacy of radio journalism, especially This American Life, as a model for bringing a human voice together with a soundscape. That helps explain why the game’s stories can feel personal even when their events turn surreal: they are framed as individual accounts, not as a single, neutral explanation of the family’s past.
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Personal history informed the game, but it is not a direct memoir
Dallas said his mother was diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer while he was making The Unfinished Swan and died during the first year of developing What Remains of Edith Finch. He described that experience, alongside a longstanding interest in death and impermanence, as part of why family became a major focus across the two games. He has described family as something people make that can continue after they are gone.
He also said the Finch house and stories were based around Orcas Island, Washington, which his family visited often during his childhood. But he clarified that the Finch house was nothing like the home in which he grew up. Its design was meant to suggest the accumulated imprint of people changing a place over time.
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Those connections support reading the game as personally informed, not autobiographical. Dallas’s accounts do not establish that the Finch family retells his own family history, that a particular Finch death came from a real event, or that the house is a literal recreation of his childhood home.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why it can feel frightening without being designed chiefly to scare
Dallas made a distinction between conventional horror and the atmosphere he wanted. “Personally, I feel like a horror game is designed to scare you,” he said in the 2017 PlayStation Blog interview. “This game, ultimately, isn’t designed to scare you. It’s more about a sense of ominous things around you and the feeling of being in a space and a universe that you don’t fully understand.”
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That intention leaves room for players to find the game frightening or haunting. Its stories approach death, and its familiar home can open onto experiences that resist easy explanation. The tension comes less from a promise of constant scares than from partial knowledge: players encounter individual perspectives without receiving a complete, authoritative account of the Finch family.
What the inspirations add up to
The game’s haunting quality comes from the overlap of several ideas: nature that is beautiful and overwhelming, weird fiction that makes room for the unknowable, intimate family history, and short stories that each offer only one perspective. The house gives those perspectives a shared place, while the changing forms of play make each family member’s story feel distinct.
That blend also clarifies the connection to Giant Sparrow’s earlier work, The Unfinished Swan. Dallas has spoken about both games in relation to family and storytelling, while Edith Finch turns toward a darker subject and a more overtly fragmented set of narratives. The kinship is in the interest in perspective, discovery and how people make meaning—not in a claim that the two games tell the same kind of story.
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