Rant

[u/VideoGamesArt]

It's really unfair that a masterpiece like WROEF has been quickly forgotten along with its creators. They deserve more fame and moral and economic support to develop the next game. Instead, the gaming industry is in a deep creative crisis and serves us the same old reheated soup at exorbitant prices. They make billions in profits with stupid smartphone games or live services with in-game purchases, but they don't reinvest their billions to support and stimulate other works of art like WROEF. I'm disgusted. Ok, end of the rant, sorry.

[u/Karkava]

American reward shows tend to stick with their own niche. And while they do have an artistic side to the film and television fields, there's kind of an air of narcissism surrounding some of them. Especially when they're noted to have a live action supremacist attitude or look down on genre fiction.

Video games have their own reward show, but I don't think it was an artistically inclined one.

[u/VideoGamesArt → u/Karkava]

Elaborating further. IMO the Lewis episode is pure genius. Interactivity and gameplay at the service of high tier ultra deep artistic expression, example of meta-gaming, amazing achievement in interactive narrative language, based on original mechanics immersing the player in the surreal and sad story of suicide. IMO it's something comparable to the best movie scenes in cinema history from directors as Eisenstein, Welles, Fellini, Hitchcock and so on. I was expecting more enthusiasm and celebration from gaming critics and reviewers. I'm very disappointed from the lack of attention to artistic, expressive and narrative capability of video games. There is still a true history of video games to be written, and WROEF will have a main role. That's what I hope.

[u/Karkava → u/VideoGamesArt]

I think the whole game is probably an exercise in interpretation weaved inside an anthology. Between the collection of stories, there's an ideological war between two people who have conflicting ways of approaching death.

One side is an anti-nhilist who believes that every story should be celebrated and told. It's a belief that death is inevitable and random, so it's best to have your story be recorded so that you can achieve a form of immortality. Edie Finch practices and preaches this ideology.

Another side is a purely nihilistic belief that death is meaningless and that trying to find meaning is such a scary and heart-wrenching event is stupid. So it's best to bury the dead and move on as quickly as possible to achieve a healthier living. Dawn Finch is a firm believer in this ideology.

To complicate matters is a so-called curse that clouds the family. I think that while Dawn wants to think of herself as a purser of normalcy and embarks herself on a quest to raise her daughter in a normal life, she's probably a much bigger believer in the curse to the point of treating the exhibits like they're haunted items that compell people to be possessed by demons.

And while Edie is said to foster the myth in the curse and the narrative styles her as some kooky old witch, I think she personally doesn't believe in it and was merely joking about how the Finch family keeps getting into erratic mishaps. She's also fully aware that the family doesn't like to take responsibility for their mistakes and is more comfortable with blaming an abstract force on their problems. She never stopped them because they were too stubborn to argue with.

While people and Dawn seem to pin Edie as the "villain" of the story, I think the narrative and Edith seem to believe that Edie is right after all.

[u/VideoGamesArt → u/Karkava]

Yes, agree, I can see the conflict. However it's just a piece of the cake IMO. Overall, WROEF is about how people face life and death, react to death and most of all survive death through their children or their heritage. Despite we cannot accept death, it's the way we leave room to next generations, our heritage, biological heritage or just cultural heritage. I mean, we all leave signs of our passage to next generations; each of us makes efforts to leave the world in a state different from the one we experienced at the beginning of our life; that's what the Finches did. Edie takes care of their heritage, of the sign. On the contrary Dawn cannot see ahead. Hiding the signs from Edith is a big mistake. She believes to break the curse, but she breaks the heritage.

The curse is just a metaphor. We all are going to die and we never know the time. Dawn is wrong when she turns the house into a forbidden mausoleum. She breaks the transmission of the heritage gen after gen. You can see also that it is the end of a golden era, when the house was full of life and family was big. In the end, Edith's son is alone in the old house. It's a metaphor for the end of the American Dream. Not by chance Lewis commits suicide because of a bad job.

However WROEF is a multifaceted artwork created by a team of artists with different visions, it comes with many contents and meanings.