I chose to play Virginia, a mystery adventure game developed by Variable State and published through various distribution channels on PC, Playstation, and Xbox. We play as an FBI agent named Anne Tarver as we seek to unravel the mystery of a missing person in a rural Virginia town. While the gameplay loop starts off as relatively mundane, with our character driving, going to work, reading documents, and so forth, it eventually evolves into a fantastic adventure leading to weirder and weirder locations, similar to the Stanley Parable which I played last week. Throughout the game, you can interact with your environment by doing anything from kicking down iron bars to playing poker to grabbing a cold one. As such, the main gameplay loop isn’t immediately clear, as it mostly consists of going where the narrative tells you to go and interacting with whatever is in front of you along the way. In each area, you often have to interact with objects such as computers as well as other people in order to gather enough clues to progress to the next part of the story.
The only gameplay mechanic is pointing and clicking on various objects or people to interact with them and find out more information about the narrative. This means that the primary form of fun that Virginia creates is Narrative fun itself, as the story is the central focus of the game and the mechanics are simply meant to immerse the audience into the story. However, the game also brings elements of Discovery and Expression fun, with the former being brought about by the character’s Clue-like exploration of the environment around them and the latter coming from the player’s multiple dialogue and choice-based options.
The target audience is anyone who enjoys solving mysteries and good plots. The game succeeds in delivering an immersive narrative experience, but falls short in providing the excitement and exhilaration only brought about by complex gameplay mechanics and skillful challenges. Personally, I do not enjoy this kind of game, but understand that other people have different preferences. As such, I will not make the suggestion to add more movement options and/or combat into the game, as such mechanics might dilute the original vision and not appeal to the target audience. However, those mechanics would make the game more appealing to me and likely to a much wider range of players.
