Game on for Ian Dallas, a man who tells a good tale | Rebecca Nicholson
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 Garcia Mirquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude as reference points.
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