A perfect enigma is a perpetual struggle between tenable doubt and informed speculation. This is difficult to produce in any creative medium, let alone one that relies on personal interaction. Videogames almost never attempt to do this. When they do, either their authenticity is doubted or the (otherwise excellent) work requires a serious amount of time to finish production. In most cases, narrative and mystery bend the knee to gameplay, leaving conspicuous plot details to serve under the king.
Observing the plot and piecing together its mystery is Virginia’s principle substance. Players take the role of fresh-off-the-line FBI agent Anne Tarver and are challenged with sustaining the duality of her character. Objectively, Tarver reports to the sleepy town of Kingdom, Virginia in the fall of 1992 to help solve the disappearance of a teenage boy, Lucas Fairfax. Simultaneously, Tarver has been tasked to monitor her veteran partner, Maria Ortega, for professional indiscretions. The player doesn’t have direct influence on Virginia’s plot—what happens happens—allowing ample space for perception and scrutiny.
Trailers and any available synopsis may assign Virginia to the flourishing walking simulator genre. What was once a pejorative tag is now an accepted label, coming to define games that place storytelling techniques ahead of traditional gameplay. Dear Esther, Gone Home, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and, most recently, Firewatch are among the archetypes for this class of games. Virginia, with its first-person point of view, traces of conventional interaction, and fondness for subtle features, appears to be a willing subscriber.
Virginia is a traditional walking simulator until it is not, which is almost immediately. While peers are characterized by the amount of freedom granted to the player, Virginia prefers to operate in concealment. The game is composed of 42 specific scenes, and the shift between each one transitions in a smash cut—a sudden but deliberate advance to the next sequence—a technique usually employed by cinematic peers. Each piece of Virginia presents the player with a limited amount of space and a handful of things to do in that space before a hard jump to the next piece of its story. This is wild and disorienting and wonderful; Virginia absolutely does not give a shit about ingrained compulsions to immediately consume and impute the ramifications of Tarver’s position and action.
Communication is another facet of Virginia that shows exceptional constraint. There is no spoken dialogue in the game, and zero subtitles to narrate what Tarver, Ortega, or any of the other characters are thinking. Instead, the player is intended to collect information from body language, context, and objects in the environment. Occasionally Virginia will telegraph its intentions clearly, early on you’re allowed a glance at Tarver’s briefing assigning her to spy on Ortega, but even these instances snap away before you’re allowed to mire in the details. This can be viewed as an annoying and apprehensive reluctance to provide basic information, or it can be interpreted as necessary service to the structure of Virginia’s story. It doesn’t aspire to be obtuse; it seeks to lay out clues and challenges you to organize them.
Aggressive editing and peculiar communication endow Virginia’s mood and atmosphere with a dreamlike haze. There are times when Tarver appears to not be herself, and whether this is happening in her imagination or as another viewpoint of her own reality is left up to the player. There isn’t a single scene that isn’t wrought with dynamic symbolism, with particular emphasis added to repeated appearances by roaming buffalo and a cardinal bird. Assigning meaning to these instances is left to the player, although sometimes Virginia’s hesitancy to fully commit to anything can feel frustrating. In one particular sequence I couldn’t figure out if Tarver legitimately took LSD or if it was all actually happening. Virginia, true to form, provided ample evidence for either conclusion.
Virginia is allowed to revel in abstractions and metaphors through its low-fidelity presentation and uncompromised commitment to its soundtrack. The former defines Virginia as a Unity based title from a smaller development team, but it’s styled in a way that calls to mind the gouraud shaded polygons of yesteryear. Virginia looks much better than your average late 90’s game, the lighting in the local bar and lovely mesh of fall colors in outdoor areas are spectacular, but it feels designed for emphases and articulation instead of photorealism and technical prowess. The soundtrack, composed by Lyndon Holland and performed by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, feels like Twin Peaks without explicitly trying to be Twin Peaks. Virginia has to sound like this because there is no other logical way to impart its grade of mood and tension. It’s eerie, beautiful, tense, and surprisingly diverse.
Other comparisons to David Lynch’s work (or The X-Files and The Outer Limits, all of which are listed as influences on Variable State’s website) aren’t without merit. Some people think David Lynch is insane and his entire body of work is a waste of time and/or a middle finger to Frank Herbert. I concede to feeling frustrated by Mulholland Drive and pieces of Twin Peak, but I recognize the steps Lynch takes to create an unnatural sense of tension inside otherwise innocent spaces. In Lynch’s work, just being there allows the viewer to pull emotions directly out of the environment and factor them into their appraisal of the narrative. It’s completely unique in its medium.
Virginia aspires to be an interactive allusion to Lynch’s style. Some of the ways in which it presents it sequences—serene car rides, a chance encounter at a gas station, the restless aura at a local bar—succeed in throttling tension through subdued parlance. Other times characters will perform actions overloaded with metaphor; sipping a cup of coffee, building a model ship, and participating in a sinister cult ceremony are all more than they seem. Virginia’s story can’t keep pace with the complexity of Lynch’s structure, instead owing more to the gratuitous influence of The X-Files and The Outer Limits. Outside of the relaxed posture of Kentucky Route Zero, however, Virginia is perhaps the most skilled attempt at synthesizing Lynch’s style into videogame form.
There are a few traps Virginia can’t seem to evade. Sometimes it cares too much about being opaque, as if obeying an obsession to load every sequence with subtlety and clues. This is intended to be in service to the story, to provide countless scraps of information in order to form cogent (and personal) picture of Virginia. What ends up developing, however, is a portrait of a game more in love with the idea of a mystery than its own mystery. Whereas traditional games are guilty of pushing narrative aside in favor of gameplay, Virginia values its capacity to confound and confront the player more than its ability to tell a story.
Vanity is a minor sin and an acceptable sacrifice for a game of Virginia’s caliber. It’s natural to be impressed with your abilities when few others are playing the same sport.
