Virginia Reviews
A slick cinematic thriller, but interaction is limited and the story loses focus in the final act.
Virginia shows instead of tells, with a raw, understated power and a calculated nuance that make even the smallest, most mundane details brim with narrative and emotional significance. While I never found a way to impact or change significant story events, the tale of family, friendship, career, and identity that Virginia tells (without uttering a single word) was enough of a reward for my limited input. The mysteries that remain by the end especially justified a second and third visit, and even now I can feel the secrets of Kingdom, Virginia and the two women whose lives changed there luring me back for another.
Virginia's an astonishing piece of narrative design, and a game that goes where few others are capable of following.
An engaging and surreal first-person narrative adventure packed with mystery and effective emotional moments
Virginia is powerful and original
If you’re a little bit curious, or if you enjoyed any of the games with which it shares its DNA, Virginia may be one of the oddest and most fascinating things you’ve played in a long, long time. Vivid Virginia is a hell of a lot more than plain old “walking.”
There are very few games as emotionally affecting as this. The story is thrilling, powerful and thought-provoking, and the music sends chills straight through your soul.
As a whole Virginia is wonderfully cinematic, and a fantastic story to inhabit as it unfolds.
I wanted to enjoy Virginia, but the nonsense ending left me annoyed and puzzled as to its meaning. Even playing a second time, I still am not sure what really happened. Some aspects I understand, such as a scenario in which the player character ascends to her bosses rank and basically becomes him down to both the smoking and tossing a file to the person at your desk. I had someone else play for any insight, but the continual edits and metaphysics left them confused as well. There may be something there for others, but for me it was simply a good mystery gone wrong, and not one I enjoyed upon completion.
Virginia is an experience able to catch the player's attention thanks to its thriller style and its narrative resources. A good videogame with an outstanding OST recorded by the Prage Philarmonic Orchestra. One of the best indie projects on its genre.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
A mixture of quiet, reserved instruments along with dramatic strings and percussion give every moment of Virginia some levity, its change in tone, timbre, and style indicative of the weight of each scene in the game. When mixed with the camera’s specific framing the low-res polygonal visual design and clear progression delineation, Virginia is a marvel of sight and sound.
Some may dismiss it as just another pretentious walking sim, but this innovative Lynchian drama is one of the best story-based games of the year.
Virginia is, at its best, a gaming mechanism that provides slightly more immersion than watching a movie -- and at its worst, a failed walking simulator with a convoluted ending. Because it is a scripted experience light on interaction and choice, I'm not entirely sure I can recommend it as a game. There may be an inkling of promise in its budding story, but for many I imagine it will be hard to read between the lines and even harder to consider it a worthy experience.
Virginia’s tale of intrigue and mystery quickly comes full circle. In that time, it will take you to some pretty surprising, extraordinary places, and easily warrants a second playthrough. The closing moments may not be to everyone’s taste, though the journey to get there is certainly worthwhile.
Virginia offers one of the best plots in the modern videogame industry and features an OST that can be only compared to a beautiful journey. Even though its duration is too short, every player that enjoys a narrative game should give it a try.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Virignia is an experimental title that blends cinema and videogame in an unique mixture. The story is rich in mistery and requires a lot of ability in reading between the lines but the experience is worth the challenge.
Review in Italian | Read full review
With Virginia, Variable State has created a grounded piece of interactive narrative, free of the waffling conceit of the genre’s worst offenders, but not quite evocative enough to be a true classic.
Like all of the best first-person adventure games, or "walking sims", Virginia works better than its movie inspirations because of the inherent interactivity that comes with telling a story in this medium. It goes all in on delivering a surreal, Lynchian narrative and hits that nail of unreality on the head, all the way down to leaving you wondering what exactly you just witnessed.
It’s a game to savour and talk about for years to come, one that left me, just like the inhabitants of Kingdom, Virginia, speechless.
Variable State’s title offers a different way of storytelling, but relies heavily on unrelatable and abstract imagery