Virginia Reviews
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 interesting title that offers more than meets the eye. At first, the player is presented with a simple FBI case, but ultimately it evolves into something more.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
Games like Virginia are extremely rare in the industry. It will grab at you from the opening moments, and it will refuse to let go until well after the credits have rolled. It’s also on the short side, as a complete playthrough should take about two hours, three if you actively seek out the few collectibles it has to offer. While not a perfect game, as it does have small hiccups here and there, it’s definitely one of the better adventure games that I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing in recent memory.
The story is human, relatable, enabling you to build an empathetic bond with Anne with ease. And even when events go all mind-bendingly crazy as you reach the final stretch, you still care
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
Overall this experience I had with this game was quite enjoyable, the story, which you basically put together yourself was gripping enough to leave me wanting more. While I won’t pretend I understood all of the symbolism in the game I think I pretty much got the gist of the story. My ONE complaint with this game which is kind of a major one for me was the “ending”. For a game that tells a great narrative in a very unique way all building up to a major payoff doesn’t quite get it ever at any point. It almost seems like they didn’t know how to end this tale and took a major cop-out with how it wraps up and took a very “artsy” approach. While it didn’t ruin this game for me by any means did instantly knock it out of scoring in the 90s for me to where it is.
Virginia is a Rubik’s cube for your senses. The game masterfully provides you with a constant desire to explore and investigate, but can make you feel claustrophobic with its imposing soundtrack and jarring jump cuts. This is a game that takes its potentially biggest weakness and turns it into its greatest strength.
Virginia was a wild ride, that’s for sure. If you’re a fan of the genre you’d probably be angry with yourself for missing out on this game. If you’re just looking for an offbeat, kind of wacky mystery, you’ll find something here, too.
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
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.
Virginia invokes breathtaking visuals to tell a story about... Something.
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.
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.
Variable State's Virginia is by and large an unsuccessful attempt to make something interesting. An absolutely incredible soundtrack and great environmental art fail to lift the game from a bog of issues. There are some severe technical issues here, but real criticism should be pointed in the direction of the oftentimes incomprehensible narrative, which needed to be much stronger given the general lack of interactivity elsewhere.
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.
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!
If a virtual museum of chekhov's guns is your thing then there might be something to it.
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
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.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Virginia needs to go back to film school