Virginia opens on a rookie FBI agent driving into a small town that has lost a child, and it never lets you look away from her. Variable State’s 2016 release is an adventure game, an indie project and a visual novel at once, with thriller, drama and mystery themes, built as a single-player first-person interactive drama. It puts you in Anne Tarver’s view and then quietly takes away most of the things games like this usually give you. There is no inventory to manage, no dialogue wheel, no fail state. You walk, you look, you press a button to touch what’s in front of you. The game asks for about two hours and gives back a story that behaves more like a film than a case file.
Trailer, via 505 Games.
Kingdom, Virginia, 1992
The setting is the last days of summer 1992. Lucas Fairfax, a boy from the fictional rural town of Kingdom, has disappeared. Tarver, a graduate special agent, is paired with Maria Halperin, an experienced agent the bureau has already discredited. Her supervisor gives her a second job on top of the first: watch Halperin for signs of distrustfulness.
That instruction sits under every scene that follows, and it is the smartest thing the game does.
A Partner You Are Told to Watch
Halperin is not playable. She moves through the case on her own timing, and Tarver follows. The two travel between locations, talk to townspeople, and pick through objects in the environments. Variable State cuts between these scenes in real time, using dissolves and hard edits the way an editor would, pushing events forward and setting one moment against another for effect. It is a deliberate choice, and it mostly works. The game trusts you to read a room without being told what to feel about it.
The Cave and the Locket
The investigation turns up Lucas’s interest in photography and a nearby cave where he may have spent time. Tarver and Halperin narrowly escape a minor cave-in. They return the next day, and a young teen accosts Halperin and takes a locket she wears, which holds a photo of her mother, Judith Ortega, also once an FBI agent. They arrest the teen. Among his possessions is LSD, and Anne keeps a small sample for herself. That detail lands without comment, and it should.
The Observatory and the Air Force Base
Lucas’s photos point to the town’s abandoned observatory. When the agents move on it, forces from the local Air Force base block access. Townspeople arrive too, including Lucas’s father and the mayor. It is the moment the case stops being a missing-child search and becomes something the town is organized to protect.
Judith Ortega and the Files
Back at headquarters, Anne looks into Judith and learns the agency discredited her for unusual investigation methods, the same charge that hangs over Maria. Then, at a gas station, Maria knocks over Anne’s bag and finds the secret files on herself. She drives off and leaves Anne behind. Anne goes looking for the locket, then breaks into Maria’s empty apartment and finds a room full of case files from Judith’s time at the agency. Judith had been investigating Anne’s father. She had found a conspiracy inside the FBI. Anne finds Maria, returns the locket, and the story takes its supernatural turn.
What the Camera Does
The first-person view is the whole game. Scenes transition through real-time cinematic editing, with cuts and dissolves timed to the story rather than to the player. That is a genuine idea, and Virginia commits to it. But the same restraint that makes the editing sharp makes the play thin. Walking between rooms and pressing a button on objects is not investigation; it is attendance. The game wants you to feel the case rather than solve it, and for long stretches that works, but there are stretches where you are simply moving a camera toward the next cut.
The Release
Virginia released on September 22, 2016, for macOS, PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One. It was developed by Variable State and published by 505 Games, which picked up the game on August 30, 2016, alongside a demo on Steam. Jonathan Burroughs and Terry Kenny directed. Lyndon Holland composed the music. Burroughs, Kenny and Holland co-wrote the script. The game was first announced in July 2014 and originally slated for 2015, with a prototype shown at the 2014 Future of StoryTelling summit and at the EGX Leftfield Collection that year.
Where It Lands
Virginia is a short, controlled piece of storytelling that trusts its audience more than most games in its genre, and that trust is the reason to play it. The performances are not the draw, because there is barely any dialogue to perform. The draw is structure: the cuts, the withheld information, the way a locket and a cave-in and an LSD sample sit in the same story without anyone explaining why. Where it falls short is agency. A mystery adventure that asks you to uncover a conspiracy should let you do some of the uncovering, and Virginia mostly hands it to you in scenes you watch rather than scenes you work.
The supernatural turn in the final stretch is the part that will divide people. It arrives late, it is not set up with much care, and it reframes a case the game spent most of its runtime grounding in small-town realism. It reads less like a payoff and more like a shrug.
Still, the ambition is real, and the two hours are not wasted. Variable State built something that looks and moves like nothing else from its release year, and the restraint is a choice rather than a shortfall, even when it costs the game its grip. Virginia is worth playing for its editing alone, and worth arguing about for everything it refuses to explain.
It holds a 6.8/10 from the IGDB critic aggregate, across 17 outlets.
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