Critical Play: Virginia

Virginia is a really interesting game that takes the player through what is basically a film. The narrative of the game feels almost entirely linear and written out to, with the player taking only prescribed actions to advance the story of the game, yet the game’s surrealism and ambiguity leave its story almost up to the player’s interpretation.

Virginia is particularly interesting in the way that it’s presented. With cuts between action to speed things up, the game is made incredibly realistic — buildings are as expansive and empty as they are in real life, and the game instead steps in to skip to the interesting parts with hard cuts, like in a film. It also eschews dialogue completely, and instead presents its narrative with.gestures, interactions, and writing. The player learns about the characters through their actions, such as Ortega taking off her wedding ring as she enters a bar. While many scenes in Virginia take place normally, many others are dreams or other surreal experiences that make the player question what’s really happening. Of course, this whole game is framed as a story about a past investigation, so the narrator, too, is unreliable.

The game’s mystery is about the disappearance of a boy named Lucas, but here the real story is what happens to the main character and her partner. In this way, the mystery becomes merely a frame to build the story, and through investigating the mystery, we learn about the story around it.