Virginia Reviews

Virginia is ranked in the 56th percentile of games scored on OpenCritic.
6 / 10
Sep 22, 2016

It's rare for a game to make me swing back and forth a full 5 points on the score, but Virginia managed exactly that, and that's probably a sign of exactly how divisive this short piece of interactive story-telling is going to be. Let's settle around the middle.

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9 / 10.0
Sep 22, 2016

Virginia takes the adventure game to new places, and while not everyone might want to join in on the trip, those that do will be rewarded with a thoroughly mesmerising experience that stays with you long after the credits roll

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Sep 22, 2016

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.

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9 / 10.0
Sep 23, 2016

What an incredible year: after Inside, here's another software taht will influence and change the way we'll experience a story. Virginia is not a good game. Neither a good movie. It is something different: something new.

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Oct 6, 2016

Virginia achieves a level of complex and thrilling storytelling that is difficult to achieve without any words.

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Oct 3, 2016

Virginia is astounding in many ways. The way it conveys its meaning through visuals, character tics, a few hundred written words and one incredible score without uttering a single line of dialogue is remarkable. Confident and measured use of editing lends a sense of style, but Variable State's swagger turns to over-confidence in the final stretch and leaves Virginia on a befuddling rather than satisfying note.

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4.5 / 10.0
Sep 26, 2016

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.

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4 / 5.0
Sep 26, 2016

It is easy to come away from Virginia inspired and reeling from the vision that the team at Variable state have conjured; it is impossible to come away unchanged.

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7 / 10.0
Sep 23, 2016

Players are offered no real choices within this tersely edited walking simulator, and yet the contemplative nature of the game keeps things feeling unusually satisfying. That’s because you’re given the imaginative freedom to engage with what they’re seeing, more so than in Dear Esther, such that the game feels like an interactive studio tour through a detective’s dreams.

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6.5 / 10.0
Oct 24, 2016

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.

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Stevivor
Top Critic
7.5 / 10.0
Sep 26, 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.

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93%
Oct 6, 2016

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.

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8.4 / 10.0
Sep 29, 2016

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.

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9 / 10.0
Oct 5, 2016

A weird and wonderful game that although short, leaves one hell of a mark

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Oct 3, 2016

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.

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games(TM)
games™ Team
Top Critic
8 / 10
Nov 29, 2016

An interactive experience unlike any other

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2.5 / 10.0
Sep 22, 2016

An interesting idea that has flashes of brilliance, but is hampered by baffling and counterintuitive design decisions.

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6 / 10.0
Oct 24, 2016

As a piece of art, I quite appreciate Virginia. but I certainly won't be revisiting Virginia in the future.

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3.8 / 5.0
Sep 25, 2016

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!

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Unscored
Sep 22, 2016

Virginia’s intimacy makes it more than a Twin Peaks wannabe

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