Virginia Reviews
While extremely confusing at times, Virginia manages to keep players glued to their screens thanks to the wonderful scenery and camera work, mixed with a wonderful story that is to some degree up to those at the helm to interpret. While to some it might be rather annoying to be trapped in silence, never getting a true grasp of what is happening, the pay-off of this style of storytelling allows the adventure to make up for that. Few games manage to capture the mood as well as this one, and some of the surrealistic segments are truly disturbing, making people question the line between reality and imagination, and even whether or not there is actually one to begin with. Virginia is a game that is easy to recommend to anyone who wants to experience something that is truly outside of the ordinary in the industry and truly flexes its creative muscles.
Even if you recently watched Stranger Things, you might notice a few similarities with Virginia in the subtle and sometimes explicit otherworldly allusions to the masked reality that we cannot actively perceive. This whole feeling that something could be hiding around the corner definitely adds to the suspense that runs throughout most of the game. One might get a fourth-wall-breaking sense that the developers are slowly peeling back the mystery and everything that unravels is for you to behold and try your damndest to make sense of it all.
If 90's thriller is your bag, Virginia does it magnificently. Loaded with surreal coincidence and unsettling theatrics, its deliciously David Lynch. In another medium, this thing could’ve been great, but its allegiance to film form ultimately restricts its potential as a game.
Virginia invokes breathtaking visuals to tell a story about... Something.
I liked my time with this one for my Virginia review. Playing it a second time after having gone through it all actually allowed me to notice some details here and there that I missed the first time around – or perhaps it was that I didn’t know what they meant in the game’s story. If you’re looking for a different type of “walking simulator” then I recommend that you play Virginia on PS4. It offers an interesting and bizarre story with plenty of weird things to experience in a short package.
Virginia is one of these labours of love that's hard being… hard towards. From the realism-meets-surrealism visuals and the passionate orchestral tunes, to the great way the whole thing is directed, it's pretty obvious that the developer shows lots of promise. Unfortunately, everything crumbles under the complete lack of interactivity, and the initially enjoyably nonsensical… "plot."
Virginia takes you on an unforgettable, incomprehensible journey.
If a virtual museum of chekhov's guns is your thing then there might be something to it.
Virginia is a sharp thinking, plot driven single-player adventure like few out there. It borrows heavily from other games of its ilk, yet twists it into its own strange beast. Unlike plenty of others, such as Firewatch, Virginia also manages to actually live up to its premise and deliver a satisfying, thought provoking conclusion. I'd love to go deeper on this because Virginia is a game all about its story and it's delivered, but a mystery such as this best served piping hot with a cup of joe on the side.
Virginia’s intimacy makes it more than a Twin Peaks wannabe
Virginia shows what can happen when people with a passion for games, story telling and perhaps a touch of avant garde get together and let their collective subconscious flow. It is not too out of place to say this is an art house game… perhaps the more populist thing to call it would be an intellectual game… the important thing to know is that it has the capacity to make you think and feel and any game that can do that is certainly a worthy title to add to your collection. Virginia helps solidify the notion that games can be art!
As a piece of art, I quite appreciate Virginia. but I certainly won't be revisiting Virginia in the future.
An interesting idea that has flashes of brilliance, but is hampered by baffling and counterintuitive design decisions.
An interactive experience unlike any other
Virginia's extensive use of jump and match cuts makes it the meeting point of games and film, though it's not the most successful of experiments.
A weird and wonderful game that although short, leaves one hell of a mark
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. Virginia does. The fallout could have been an obtuse curiosity, but it succeeds in throttling tension through subdued parlance, laying out a series of clues and challenging the player to organize them into a cogent (and personalized) picture of the story.
Virginia is an intensely intimate, powerful and thought-provoking experience masquerading as an homage to supernatural detective thrillers, and it is one of the most important games of 2016.
It’s a good thing that Virginia is such a neatly-packed experience, because I definitely needed to run through it twice to get a firmer grip on the story being told. Clocking in at about two hours, it’s a good idea to run through once for the story, and a second time to explore more deeply into the minutiae and context clues that help fill in the gaps, once you have an idea of the overarching plot – and if you want to fill out your trophy list, to boot. Having a (relatively) firm grasp of the story, I’d be curious to learn more about the real-world FBI case it draws inspiration from. If you’ve been itching for another ‘thinker’ game, Virginia might just be right up your alley.
This was a hard game to score because I really wanted to love it more than I did. The unique storytelling format and intense musical score carry what is an otherwise perplexing narrative that tries very hard to be profound but ends up feeling a bit muddled.