Virginia is a game about jump cuts. Experimental jump cuts. It pushes the jump cut to within two feet of itself. Jump cuts across the room. Jump cuts through a door. Jump cuts – now!
Honestly, I can’t say I particularly enjoyed this game. It lacked the mise-en-scene of Gone Home; the wacky mind-bending campiness of Layers of Fear, or even the peaceful minimalism of Proteus. It’s main focus is on narrative and symbolism; propelled along at quite a pace and flushed with keys and dreams and surreal buffalo visitations. Ostensibly, it tells the story of two FBI agents investigating the disappearance of a teenage boy in suburban Virginia. The agent you play has also been assigned to investigate her partner on the case, as well as clearly struggling with her own issues at home.
Taking cues from Blendo Games’ (Brendon Chung) Thirty Flights of Loving, Virginia tells it’s tale by threading together missing scenes (a la jump cuts), silent exchanges (there is no voice acting) and driving sequences (the go-to-jump-cut-location).The game provides minimal direct interactivity for the player; rather preferring they engages on an imaginative level; piecing together the characters’ cut up relationships and uncovering the rest of the proverbial iceberg.
This piecing together has, for me and for the most part, happened after the fact. Unlike other, more ambling ‘walking-sims’ (quietly sick in the corner) Virginia doesn’t provide much musing time. What with all the jump cuts, scenes are often loaded with expectancy (when’s it gunna –
This provides a rather unique tone to the game; though personally it feels at odds with the investigative theme of the story. While there are moments where you can look around and investigate, I found little reward in doing so. Nothing to uncover; very little visual information to examine.
During my first run, however, I found few moments of intrigue or excitement. Even the jump cuts became rhythmic and routine. Though I mentioned it above, I don’t think this is entirely down to low interactivity as, turning back at Thirty Flights, that game had very little interactivity but I found it a great deal more engaging.
It could be down to tone. Thirty Flights was like a good-times Godard movie while Virginia, to quote Christian Donlan’s Eurogamer review, has a “a brooding fixation on disappointment and complicity”. Such a tone works for me in games such as Silent Hill or Sanitarium, where there are game-y things within them to emphasis these sensations to the player. Indeed, these games often over emphasis; leading to their somewhat cheesy delivery. In comparison, Virginia is much more down to earth than either of these two; clearly more interested in small human interactions; how we communicate our displeasure and disappointment to each other through small gestures. But somehow it feels neutered as a game.
In terms of simulation, game’s have always struggled with this naturalistic display of human interaction; but Virginia throws the whole simulation-approach out the window, giving the player the role of interpreter rather than active participant.
Such an approach has interesting outcomes in theory, but none of them seem to happen in the game. We’re sped along, jump cut here and there, and left to consider what everything might have meant. I think this will appeal to some people, but personally I would like to have more involvement, more agency. Perhaps that’s the irony at the centre of the game.