Virginia is an unapologetically cinematic beast. A first-person narrative game from developer Variable State and publisher 505 Games, it sees players operate—with minimal interactivity—from behind the eyes of Special Agent Anne Tarver, a newly minted FBI agent tasked with visiting the town of Kingdom, Virginia, and investigating the disappearance of local teen Lucas Fairfax. You walk around locations in town, moving Anne’s gaze across the scenery, occasionally clicking on objects to interact with them and move on to the story’s next beat. Outside of a few minimal collection side quests, it’s an entirely linear experience, with very little—outside of the camera’s movement—placed in the player’s direct control.
That’s not a bad thing. In fact, those brief sops to more traditional tasks—which mostly involve scouring crime scenes for random flowers that Tarver uses to decorate her home—get in the way of one of Virginia’s most impressive feats: It feels like every player-driven pivot of the camera, every step forward and nervous backward glance, is part of the script. When the player surveys a new crime scene or glances down at their feet while riding in the passenger seat, it manages to feel like something that they, as Anne, are choosing to do, rather than a random, thoughtless twitch of the mouse.
The game uses a couple of tricks to pull this off—some big and flashy, some far more subtle. Variable State does a fantastic job of drawing the player’s eye wherever it wants them to go. One early dream sequence demonstrates how well this works: First, a desk lamp draws the player’s attention to the seemingly normal left side of her bedroom, giving the illusion that she’s simply woken up. Then, sound cues pull them back to the right, where an enigmatic buffalo has intruded on the normal setting, seemingly summoned from the ether. Just as that registers, red light flares from the left again, giving players just enough time to turn back and glimpse an open door that’s backlit with eerie crimson brilliance before the sequence suddenly cuts out.
Those dramatic edits are the biggest guns in the game’s cinematic arsenal. At any given moment, a scene in Virginia can jump ahead without warning, a technique Variable openly acknowledges it borrowed from Brendon Chung’s Thirty Flights Of Loving. But where Thirty Flights uses its abrupt edits to disorient or tease, Virginia uses them for a far more traditional purpose. In film, we rarely watch every step of someone heading down a staircase or driving to a new location. Instead, the editor gives us just enough to understand what’s going on, and then cuts away to something more interesting. Virginia operates the same way: We don’t need to watch every step as Anne descends to meet her new partner, Maria Halperin, to understand that she’s been relegated to the lowest dregs of the FBI. Instead, all we need are a few turns around a spiral staircase and a cut to a desolate basement for the game’s meaning to be made clear.