GAMETECH: Silence is golden in Virginia

ONCE upon a time, there was a man called Mario. He jumped on some turtles and rescued the princess. The end. The lack of storytelling never hurt Mario, whose universe is one of the most celebrated in gaming.

Virginia takes a very different approach. This is a game in which you watch a layered story unfold, simply pushing scenes along with a few button presses. It’s an interactive film, in which you can walk around a room, for example, taking in the surrounding details, before clicking on a pre-determined object to move to the next scene. It’s like watching a film through the eyes of the protagonist, with the ability to stop and smell the roses from time to time.

We’ve seen this kind of game before, of course, but Virginia is one of the classier examples. Set in the 1990s in the US state of the same name, Virginia is the story of an FBI detective investigating the disappearance of a young boy in the town of Kingdom. Simultaneously, the detective is also investigating her partner for internal affairs. The developers claim that Twin Peaks, The X-files and True Detective were all inspirations and you can see why — this is a weird, moody, highly symbolic story that leaves much of its value open to interpretation and gets weirder as it goes along.