Virginia Reviews
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.
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.
An engaging and surreal first-person narrative adventure packed with mystery and effective emotional moments
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.
Virginia is powerful and original
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
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
A weird and wonderful game that although short, leaves one hell of a mark
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 is a fantastic piece of interactive fiction, and a fantastic videogame. It’s rare to see a game that truly innovates on the way a story can be told through this medium, and to have something that doesn’t only push those boundaries but does so this effectively is a real treat.
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
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.
Virginia takes you on an unforgettable, incomprehensible journey.
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 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
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.
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.
Saying that Virginia is unique is an understatement, there is nothing like it on any Xbox-console. The storytelling and music are sublime making the game an easy game to recommend.
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’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.