You are investigating the case of a missing person investigation in the small idyllic town of Kingdom in the Burgess County of Virginia through the eyes of graduate FBI agent Anne Tarver. Together with your partner, seasoned investigator Maria Halperin, the two of you investigate the disappearance of a young boy who nobody seems to know how or why they vanished.
Before long Anne finds herself negotiating competing interests, uncovering hidden agendas, and testing the patience of a community unaccustomed to uninvited scrutiny. Throughout this journey you will have to make decisions which will shaped the course of Anne’s and Maria’s lives all while investigating a town that seems to have a dark secret.
From the outset Virginia is fantastically paced. Unlike other games in the so called “Walking Simulator genre” there is no meandering about or spending minutes or even hours wandering around the games location looking for either an object, character, or just the next location to be in for the next event to happen.
If anything it’s paced more like a movie with cuts from one location to another much like how a movie cuts from one scene to another, leaving the implication of characters moving from one area to another instead of just having the game force you to wander around it’s beautifully crafted location at the speed of someone who sprained their ankle.
And the game does all of this without any character saying a word, doing a fantastic job of showing instead of telling.
That being instead, while the first half of the game comes out swinging, having no fat and leaving me interested in what the game had to offer, the second half of the game completely lost me when a lot happened all at once that made little sense due to how much was unexplained.
It just comes across as the game doing too much too fast when the game suddenly goes from subtlety getting it’s characters intentions across to cranking it up to 11 and numerous things started happening that really needed some context. I know that the game is wearing it’s influences on it’s sleeve, but the things that it takes it’s influences from, namely Twin Peaks, were paced out more slowly and let the audience take things in as the show went on.
Maybe if Virginia was presented more episodically in nature and expanded things out with the same lean pacing it wouldn’t have been so jarring when the second half of the game started introducing several twists and turns to it’s more grounded story.
There is something here in Virginia, and I wish that I could say that it lives up to the potential of that something, but unfortunately it never gets to see it.
https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/374030/
https://www.gog.com/en/game/virginia
Cult Classic Corner - Video Games 