Critical Play: Mysteries
For this critical play, I played Virginia by 505 Games.
The game is a walking simulator and so the type of fun expected from it is mostly narrative and discovery. There’s very little you can do besides moving around an interacting with certain objects. But, I still enjoyed playing through the game a lot, and what kept me playing was figuring out what the narrative was.
As an FBI agent, you initially set out to figure out the mystery of the case. But gradually, the mystery grows and encompasses you, the character, and your role. I think the game designers did a great job of merging the narrative and the mystery; it was a little confusing but still an enjoyable experience. The use of sudden jump cuts between locations, times, and realities is disorienting, but I think it was artfully done in that the game feeds you bits and pieces of information here and there just like a mystery does. This control of information kept me interested in playing more to put the whole picture together.
The visuals accompanying the mystery were also very well done. The careful use of cut-scenes in certain areas ties in well with the information trickle to highlight certain details. The world-building was thorough and also contributed to the feeling of mystery where small details would give you an answer but also leave you with more questions. What was interesting to me was that the world was full of detail yet at the same time empty of substance. The areas you explored were overflowing with objects and stuff, but the art and lighting was done in a way that made them feel unimportant. So when something had a tiny bit of extra detail, it pops out and you know it’s something important. They designed it so the visuals of the world were always guiding you to move forward. There was no dialog throughout the game, so any text that appeared was especially eye-catching.
One thing I thought could have been done a little better was the interactions. It was a little too “spoon-fed.” I personally enjoy walking simulators with their simplicity of interaction and focus on narrative, but in Virginia, the few interactions there were only served to move the story forward. There weren’t really any puzzles that make you think about how to interact with this or that to put the pieces together and progress; it was just one click and the story moves forward. But in a way, the confusing nature of the narrative is the puzzle. They left the ending pretty open to interpretation, and kind of at a meta level, the game itself was the puzzle.
