Virginia
First I liked Virginia, then it turned to be kind of meh, and then I hated it with the power of a thousand suns.
But I still feel bad criticizing it because despite its flaws, it’s a clear labor of love. I know the same can be said about many games, and not necessarily just indie ones, but Virginia has that something special. The attention to detail in unnecessary places, the devotion to the soundtrack integration, the care with which the menu options are offered — all of that and more amounts to a game that the developers, I think, truly wanted to make.
To be clear, it’s not an innocent little indie game made by two guys in the basement: no game that can afford the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra is. And Virginia’s credits last forever (and are unskippable, because everyone needs to know, apparently), so it’s actually quite a big production by indie standards.
Still, you can feel it has a pulse, and that makes it that one bit harder to harshly criticize. And it’s beautiful in its own way (I liked this style of cartoonish design much better than in Firewatch), the soundtrack is indeed good and easily adds points to the review score, and the amount and quality of the first-person animations — a thing rarely seen in an indie game — is surprising.
Alas, noblesse oblige, so now that we have the pleasantries out of the way, let me explain why I think it’s one of the worst thing I have ever experienced.
For about half an hour I ignored the signs that now seem so obvious. You don’t “Start the Game”, you “Play Feature”. The menus are form over matter, changing a simple option requires you to sit and wait until the fancy animation ends. The opening segment is unskippable credits, something that even most movies stopped doing a few years ago because nobody cares.
Then the “game” itself is letterboxed.
But I considered it all just a quirky presentation, a unique stylization, an echo of Kojima’s self-indulgent-but-somehow-awesome approach.
I should have known better.
Some people will tell you that Virginia is about two FBI agents investigating a missing boy in a small American town, but what the “game” is really about is finding hotspots that will trigger a cut-scene.
That’s it. That’s the entire interaction.
You walk, and you walk very slowly, and you look around, and you look around very slowly, and once you find a hot spot — a door handle, a mirror, a bag — and click on it, a first person cut-scene is played, and at the end of it you’re placed in a new environment in which you have to walk, and you walk very slowly, and look around, and you look around very slowly, and you need to find another hot spot.
Sometimes you don’t need to walk. You click on a box, and a cut-scene plays in which you pick up the box. The screen freezes. You click again to see an animation of inserting a key into the box. The screen freezes. You click again to unlock the box. The screen freezes. You click to open the lid of the box. The screen freezes. Then the final click puts the box down.
It’s ridiculous.
Some people compared the “gameplay” to being “as interactive as turning the pages of a book” but I think that does not quite cut it. Turning the page is easy. You know when, you know how, and it’s fast. Finding a hot spot in Virginia is slow, boring, and tiring. It’s an uninspired guessing game in which you look at a room full of uninteresting objects knowing that only one will move the action forward. It’s work, not play.
But Adrian, you liked Dear Esther and Gone Home, you tweeted me (for the record, I loved Gone Home, but I think Dear Esther is the most boring purple prose ever, it’s just that I think it’s also a milestone in gaming and game design). And Adrian, in Dear Esther you don’t even have an interaction button, literally all you do is walk around!
Yes, but:
a) Dear Esther was fresh. The lack of what we considered as sine qua non in game design felt fresh. It stimulated the mind, at least the mind of a game designer. And then we moved on, because playing a cameraman has a limited shelf life. But when Dear Esther happened, what it did was interesting.
b) You could absorb the world and solve its puzzle at your own pace, and that gave you a tiny degree of control over the experience. Freezing the screen or not doing anything in Virgina does not quite replicate this feeling.
c) Dear Esther was beautiful, and the sense of presence rivals most games to this day. Standing on a shore of an island covered in Autumn, wind in your hair, cold air in your lungs, is not the same as standing inside a pointless cartoon corridor.
d) Dear Esther is about a place that is the story, Virginia is a story about the story. As a result, Dear Esther’s story is driven by environmental interaction, and Virginia’s story is driven by human interaction (even if any of these “interactions” are in your head only). Dear Esther offers an illusion that you control the environmental interaction (the island is an open world space), Virginia does not offer the luxury of such a deception for its human interaction.
Bearing all of the above in mind, the best way I can explain the difference between Virginia and Dear Esther is that the latter, despite the lack of any physical interaction, made you believe that you, the player, matter. Meanwhile, Virginia turns you into a soulless, broken remote controller.
But for the first half an hour, Virginia was interesting. That’s the problem with video games: pressing buttons and seeing things happen on the screen as a result of that is the curse of video games, because it makes things more interesting than they really are.
No, yeah, I really mean it.
Look, a boring movie is a boring movie. When the cinema was invented, all they had to show was a train approaching the screen and people were excited as if they just discovered an alien life on Mars. Once the novelty wore off, though, filmmakers actually had to make their movies interesting: hilarious, sad, shocking — whatever worked. But just showing stuff on a big screen no longer worked.
Meanwhile, gamers still give games a pass just because interactivity in itself is so much fun. And if a game offers something new in the interaction and visual departments, well, GIFs on Reddit get thousands of upvotes because look at these fucking rocks moving in Uncharted 4.
This curse is one of the reason why we live with crappy story-telling in games, and why games don’t evolve as fast as movies had to, because hey, maybe the story was stupid and the characters flat, but holy shit was the final boss intense.
To be clear, I am under the same spell. I could not sleep after I’ve seen a skeleton casting a 3D shadow in the demo of Into the Shadows, and I still enjoy just making Mario jump around without any real purpose.
So, initially, Virginia was interesting. Just because of the joy of a computer program reacting to buttons.
But then after an hour I asked myself: “Okay, but why does Virginia exist in a video game form?” (or: “Okay, but why does Virginia exist in a software form?” for those of you who still live in 2012).
I asked myself this question trying to figure out if Virginia’s form enhances the experience in any way.
I think it’s a crucial question to ask. All forms of art offer a unique experience, which is why it’s often so hard to turn a book into a movie. And that’s great, that’s wonderful.
But it the case of Virginia, the way it handles the experience does not enhance it in any way. There’s just nothing there. No, scratch that, whatever is in there is actually making the experience worse, because walking, and you walk very slowly, and looking around, and you look around very slowly, and finding a hot spot to click on to move the action forward is detrimental to the experience.
My own definition of what is a game is that if you can turn the experience into a movie and nothing whatsoever will be lost, then it’s not a game and it’s just a waste of everybody’s time.
As you can see, it’s a very broad definition of a game, and so far only Virginia does not cut it.
Virginia could easily be a movie, and nothing would be lost. With the amount of and the quality of its story it’d be nothing more than a ten minute long Vimeo from someone who loves Lynch but does not understand him — but that would still be better than the same thing inflated to 90 minutes by slowly walking through meaningless corridors.
This is usually when I tell you that hey, it’s just me, but your mileage may vary, and some people love the game (they do) and it got some amazing reviews (it did). But not this time. Instead, it’s time for even more critique, so I highly recommend this excellent, and I mean excellent review of the game at Kill Screen (of all places!):
As you can see, I am a bit angry. But I am not angry that Virginia wasted my time, I am angry because Virginia is a wasted potential. If the developer applies the same amount of quality work with more grounded and less pretentious story to an experience with any sort of meaningful interaction, I’ll be the first in queue.
But for now, the most meaningful interaction I got out of Virginia is how satisfying it felt to click the Uninstall button.
“Playing”.
Anyway, not to end this review on such a sour note, let me talk quickly about something completely different: a small feature that the developers got right. It’s something we’ve seen in other games, I think, but it works nicely enough in Virginia to point it out.
When an object is non-interactive, even if it’s a mysterious door leading probably to an even more mysterious place, but no, of course you won’t be able to open it, the crosshair is a small dot:
Here, again, for a better visibility:
But when something is interactive, no matter how far you are from it, the crosshair turns into a slightly larger circle:
When you’re near enough to interact with said object, the crosshair turns into a diamond:
Simple but effective, and helps ease the pain.
