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Boundary-pushing ‘Virginia’ is one of the stranger things

photos by 505 games

In “Virginia,” a first-person thriller developed by Variable State and published by 505 Games for Windows and Mac computers, you play Anne Tarver, an FBI agent fresh out of the academy. The year is 1992 and you’re investigating the disappearance of a young boy in a small Virginia town and — as per the instructions of your somewhat shady-seeming director — your partner, who has come to the attention of Internal Affairs.

“Virginia” has a cel-shaded style that looks like something out of a comic book. A small but significant chunk of the game is spent doing everyday tasks like putting on lipstick and sipping coffee — usually you click on an object to make these sequences go forward a step. None of the characters speak — many a conversation is mouthed, and you can see characters react to what is happening or being said — but there are no words. It gives everything a one-step-from-reality feel.

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So on the one hand, there’s a lot of hyper-realism here. But on the other, magical realism soon begins to affect the proceedings — with dream sequences, chronological jumps, and so on. Things get really, really weird.

It takes a while, though, for the weirdness and the narrative momentum to kick in, which is why I didn’t like “Virginia” at first. And especially early on, it has a tendency to remind you that you’re in a video game. There are situations where the world snaps into a semi-stasis around you until you figure out exactly where you’re supposed to click: It felt strange to wander around on the stage at my FBI academy graduation, for example, with people applauding and snapping photographs, while the game was waiting for me to shake the director’s hand. There was a similar issue during a sequence at the home of the missing boy, where I had to find a particular thing in the house, and until I did the interview between an FBI agent and the boy’s family members proceeded wordlessly and endlessly.

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Developers of narrative-rich games are going to have to figure out: When does interactivity matter? It would not have detracted from the game at all if that graduation sequence had been less interactive. You want to give gamers some freedom, yes, but we’re talking about a scripted sequence!

Once those semi-static moments became less common and the game picked up the pace, “Virginia” started winning me over. It introduced new symbols and narrative elements in a clever way, dropping them into the world and then iterating them over and over. This is an evocative, imagery-rich story, and I can’t really compare it to any other game I’ve played. In terms of its other influences from popular culture, “Twin Peaks” is the most obvious, though at various points it reminded me of everything from “The Sopranos” to “Stranger Things.”

In the end, I didn’t fully “get” the story; by the time you reach its conclusion, “Virginia” is practically firehosing you with, well, narrative stuff, and the weirdness ramps up considerably. But I also felt the story had a coherent underlying grammar that I just hadn’t quite cracked, and that if I played through a few more times I’d pick up something new each time. “Virginia” isn’t a game for everyone, but I think it pushes the boundaries of interactive storytelling in really useful, interesting, and courageous ways.

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Jesse Singal can be reached at jesse.r.singal@gmail.com.