Virginia Reviews
I found Virginia to be an excellent story with deep emotional aspects that were conveyed very well.
A slick cinematic thriller, but interaction is limited and the story loses focus in the final act.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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A surreal love letter to detectives and David Lynch.
Virginia is extremely well made and a sight for you to behold, a well-developed drama that should be experienced by all. There are issues I found with it, which detract from the experience, but outside of the controls I can see why they were used.
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.
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.
If a virtual museum of chekhov's guns is your thing then there might be something to it.
Variable State’s title offers a different way of storytelling, but relies heavily on unrelatable and abstract imagery
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.
As a piece of art, I quite appreciate Virginia. but I certainly won't be revisiting Virginia in the future.
Virginia invokes breathtaking visuals to tell a story about... Something.
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.
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 is the only thing which prevents itself from achieving greatness, as it tries to imitate a TV show, while attempting to abandon the fact that it’s a videogame. As previously stated, a combination of videogame mechanics, with a structure and direction of a TV series, is borderline impossible and Virginia is a great example of that.
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.