For this week’s critical play, I played the game Virginia, a first-person mystery adventure video game developed by Variable State and published by 505 Games. The game is available on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows, and macOS, and is targeted towards adults who like thrillers. The game follows graduate FBI special agent Anne Tarver as she investigates her first case: the disappearance of a boy in rural Virginia. For my playthrough, I played the game on Windows. Virginia uses environmental storytelling, embedded narratives, and simple mechanical loops to immerse players into the mystery of the game.
Upon paying for, downloading, and opening the game for the first time, players are greeted with a movie-like intro with suspenseful music and visuals that prepare them for the narrative they are about to play through. As the game begins, players are thrust into the point-of-view of Anne Tarver, and control the narrative using the simple mechanics of walking and interacting with objects. At first, during my playthrough, I had no clue who I was playing as, or where the story would even take me. As I started walking and interacting with doors and objects along the way, I was able to use the environment and context clues to build the narrative that the game portrays. For example, I was able to deduce that Anne Tarver just graduated FBI training in the opening scene where she gets handed her badge on the stage of a packed auditorium. Virginia uses environmental storytelling to advance the narrative and to give players clues to uncover the mystery in the game.
Virginia, while portraying a sequence of events that had already happened, does so in a non-linear way. Through flashbacks, vignettes, and through clues that the player interacts with, the game is able to provide more context into the environments and world it builds, as well as provide more context into the characters and their motivations. Through these embedded narratives, players are able to put puzzle pieces together and immerse themselves into the narrative while still picking up clues and information from the past.
Virginia has a simple mechanical loop that players use to advance the narrative. The controls of walking and interacting with objects keeps this loop simple. To advance the story, the player must walk and explore the environment around them, and find objects that they are able to interact with until they discover new clues to advance the story and to “unlock” new environments, in which they repeat the same loop. This simple game loop makes the game feel more like an interactive movie than an actual game, though.
In conclusion, Virginia uses a combination of non-linear storytelling, the environment, and a simple game loop to immerse players into the narrative. However, I wish that the game didn’t feel like I was just progressing through a linear narrative. I wish that the game had more player-driven mechanisms that involved critical thinking and player deduction, but without detracting from embedded narratives that the game does so well.
