Behind the haunting inspiration for What Remains of Edith Finch

Death is on the mind of Ian Dallas, the creative director at the game studio Giant Sparrow. That’s part of the sad inspiration for Giant Sparrow’s upcoming PlayStation 4 game, What Remains of Edith Finch.

The title is the second major game from Santa Monica, Calif.-based Giant Sparrow, which is bankrolled by Sony. Previously, the company created The Unfinished Swan, one of the finest indie games on the PlayStation 3. Dallas created that game after his mother came down with cancer, and he felt like a child who loses a parent is like an unfinished work of art. With Edith Finch, your job is to find out what happened to the Finch family. The game consists of various stories, each of them depicting the last moments of someone’s life.