Virginia
Police procedural takes a turn for the weird
YOU MIGHT THINK, on starting up Virginia and immediately graduating from the FBI academy, that you’re playing a first-person investigation game. But you’re not, and this becomes increasingly clear over the game’s two-hour running time.
We’ve mentioned the length early on because it crams a lot into that short span. Every scene is crafted, with little filler apart from a few short corridor walks— and even these can serve to inform you of a character’s status or mental state.
More interactive movie than walking simulator or traditional police game, Virginia is silent apart from a wonderful score and some sound effects. Meaning is conveyed through body language and faces, something the stylized, perhaps primitive, graphics are well chosen to express.
The game is as linear as an episode of the TV shows it takes inspiration from. There’s no reason to explore, nothing to take you off the critical path. A dot in the center of the screen becomes a circle when it moves over something interactive, and a diamond when you’re in range to use it. There’s nothing else, and at some points you surrender control completely back to the game, particularly as it cuts you in and out of scenes and locations without warning.
There are some moments of hunt-thepixel, as with the microfilm machine you must sweep your cursor over as you discover the series of moves needed to make it work, and maddening inconsistencies, such as a set of steps being unclimbable, while others in the same room, that are blocked, are your path forward. The one-button nature of the game takes the edge off, because at least you’re not trying to work out whether you need to push, pull, or eat anything, but it feels simplistic that there isn’t more to do, any secrets to find, or choices to make.
Much of your time is spent thinking about and trying to interpret what you’ve seen, which is made much harder by the way the missing-child narrative that introduces you to the game is faded into the background. It’s your relationship with your partner, plus who and what you both are, that Virginia wants to explore, with both the first seconds of the game and an insulting encounter at a gas station being situations many players will not have experienced before.
For all its shortness and linearity, Virginia is compelling. Once the developers have established that there are no rules and there’s no telling what might happen, the need to know where they’re taking things becomes unbearable. Like the writers of Lost giggling about what they made you watch, there’s a possibility that it’s all just deliberately obtuse. But when you get to the affecting end of this strange slice of smalltown America, there’s a flash of something that makes you think maybe it was all planned out from the start.