What Remains of Edith Finch is Sublime.

With so much “top of the food chain” justification for humanity’s many environmental exploits it’s impressive that we experience feelings of insignificance ^[1]Damn right it’s impressive. Everything we do is impressive. We are at the top of the food chain after all. But we do.

These momentary lapses in bravado are testament to the strange ways of the human brain. Our ability to recognize our insignificance is matched by our ability to rationalize our significance. That’s a legitimate Catch-22 for you.

For some people the moment happens when staring into the night sky, contemplating the stars, and suddenly truly grasping, even if only fleetingly, that the starry glow we see comes from a star that’s long dead before we even have the chance to waste paper romanticizing the reflected light with terrible poetry.

For some that moment happens at the birth of a first child^[2]subsequent children need to try harder to impress me. Here’s this tiny being, totally dependent upon us, and unlike a dog or a cat, we go to jail if we let this thing die.

For me that moment happened the first time I walked the line at an open casket funeral. I don’t remember the name of the deceased or whether or not I had any relation to him or her^[3]It? outside the temporary proximity forced upon me by my mother’s parental leash^[4]Not a real leash. A metaphorical one woven with a series of phrases like “Yes, you are going” and “do you want to be grounded from video games?”. I do vividly remember the stillness of the body. Even a human being holding his breath moves, almost imperceptibly, but like a telekinetic acknowledgment between like-beings, I know that human is alive. But not at this funeral. That thing in the casket was no longer a like-being.

For Ian Dallas, Creative Director of What Remains of Edith Finch, that moment of insignificance occurred while scuba diving. Dallas wanted his game to evoke a sense of the sublime. Speaking to gamesindustry.biz in a 2017 interview he says, “For me the clearest memory of that was Scuba diving as a kid, and seeing the bottom of the ocean slope away into a seemingly infinite darkness.”

He calls this moment of insignificance “a sense of the sublime.” He was simultaneously in awe of nature and reduced by it.

But me, I’m not opening my eyes in an ocean. Ignorance of the world underwater is the only thing that keeps me confident about my place in the food chain. I’ll keep my open coffin, thank you very much.