What Remains of Edith Finch is focused almost entirely on several people dying in sometimes terrible ways, but it isn’t gruesome or creepy.

Instead, each tale is beautiful in its own sad way. Sam, Lewis and Barbara’s stories are particularly well-crafted, and Milton’s will be a joy for fans of The Unfinished Swan. But Gregory’s passing is the one that will stay with me for a long, long time. It's a crushingly ordinary moment, painful because unlike some other Finch tales, it’s all too plausible.

It’s about Sven, who enjoyed woodcarving, and Calvin, who liked rocket ships. It’s about remembering that people are more than just how they ended.

Developer Giant Sparrow is no stranger to sadness. Its previous game, The Unfinished Swan, is about a young boy coming to terms with the death of his mother. Sadness is a difficult thing to convey convincingly in a game. Grief is more easily evoked — kill off a favorite character and boom, your player is sad and angry and hurt and all the things that come with a loss.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a very sad game, because it does the hard work of letting you get to know each member of the Finch family before taking them away.

In What Remains of Edith Finch, death is a certainty and life is the surprise. Its stories are enchanting, despite their unhappy ends. I was sad I never had the chance to know the Finches while they were alive, but thankful for the opportunity, however brief, to learn a bit about them. The final farewell left me crying, but What Remains of Edith Finch is, without doubt, love.

The central mystery of What Remains of Edith Finch unspooled at exactly the right speed, effortlessly sucking me in. It dropped just enough hints to be enigmatic and not annoyingly vague. The writing is stuffed with evocative lines that convey mood without ever trying too hard.

weird and vaguely menacing, but instead found it to be heartbreakingly sweet.

You play as the titular Finch, returning home for the first time in seven years. Her entire family is gone, though that's no spoiler. In fact, it's the Finch family’s shtick. The Finches have always believed themselves to be under a curse, and they all died long before their time — sometimes mysteriously, sometimes tragically.

To call What Remains of Edith Finch a game may be slightly disingenuous; it’s more of a storybook.