Virginia

What happens when a game stops making you walk to the next scene and just cuts to it? Virginia, the 2016 debut from independent studio Variable State (published by 505 Games), is built around that one idea. It commits to the answer harder than nearly anything else in narrative games.

The setup is pure prestige television. It is 1992. Anne Tarver, an FBI agent fresh out of the academy, arrives in the rural town of Kingdom, Virginia, with veteran partner Maria Halperin to investigate the disappearance of a local boy, Lucas Fairfax. The hook is in Anne’s pocket: Internal Affairs has quietly asked her to report on Halperin. You are investigating a missing child and your own partner at the same time, and the game never lets you forget which of those two jobs you agreed to first.

Nobody speaks. There is no dialogue at all, spoken or written, between characters. The story comes through animation, glances, props left on desks, and Lyndon Holland’s orchestral score, which won the 2017 BAFTA for Music. The writing won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award for Best Writing in a Video Game the same year. That is a remarkable result for a script with no lines.

In the market, Virginia sits alongside Thirty Flights of Loving, Gone Home and Firewatch: short, premium, story-first games that ask for one evening rather than one hundred hours. Its mood draws openly on Twin Peaks and The X-Files, from the small-town rot to the ominous diner booths. The reception shows how divisive that pitch is: a 74 on Metacritic sits alongside a far cooler Steam user score. That gap tells you most of what you need to know about Virginia, and the rest of this review explains why.

• Film-Style Editing: Scenes jump-cut, dissolve and montage forward in real time. The narrative sets the pace, not the length of a corridor. You might reach for a door handle and suddenly be in the passenger seat of a car three hours later.
• Wordless Storytelling: Character animation, body language and environmental detail carry the whole plot. Paperwork, photographs and small physical gestures do the work that cutscene dialogue does elsewhere.
• BAFTA-Winning Orchestral Score: Lyndon Holland’s music is the de facto narrator. It sets tone, signals tension and often tells you what a character is feeling before their face does.
• Two Investigations at Once: The missing-person case and Anne’s secret Internal Affairs brief on her partner run in parallel. That gives every shared moment a quiet charge of betrayal.
• Feature-Length Runtime: About two hours, designed to be played in a single sitting like a film.

The Edit Is the Mechanic

The most important thing in Virginia is not anything you press. It is the cut. Most first-person narrative games are stuck with dead time: the stretch between story beats where you walk down a hallway, open a drawer, and walk back. Virginia removes almost all of it. Interact with a key object and the game cuts away to the next shot, often mid-motion and sometimes mid-thought. The rhythm comes from cinema, not from level design.

When this works, it is exhilarating. Cross-cutting between Anne’s morning routine and Halperin’s suggests a relationship forming without a single exchanged word. A montage of evidence gathering covers a day of procedural work in under a minute. Match cuts link a waking scene to a dream so cleanly that the switch only registers afterwards. These are techniques film editors have refined for a century, and Variable State uses them with real fluency. It is the strongest argument yet that games can borrow editing grammar wholesale rather than awkwardly copying camera angles.

The trade-off is structural. An edit is an act of authorship, and every cut removes a decision from the player. You never choose when a scene ends. You often cannot linger on a room you were just starting to read, and the game moves on whether or not you have processed what you saw. Players who come to games for agency will find this suffocating, and the Steam complaints about lost control are a fair reaction to a deliberate design choice.

Interaction: One Button, One Way Forward

The interaction model is minimal by design. You look, you move at a slow walk, and you use a single input on highlighted objects to advance the scene. There are no puzzles in any meaningful sense, no inventory, no branching, and no failure state. Some sequences need nothing from you beyond pointing the camera in roughly the right direction.

Virginia is honest about this. It never pretends to be an adventure game, and it doesn’t pad its runtime with fake busywork. But it creates an engagement gap that some players never get past. With so little to do, hands go idle while eyes and ears do all the work. For the first hour, the novelty of the editing fills that gap. By the second hour, especially once the story turns abstract, the game starts to feel like something you watch rather than something you play.

Storytelling Without Words

Removing dialogue is the game’s riskiest decision and its most successful one. Halperin and Tarver’s relationship is built from posture: who drives, who pays, who looks away first. A file on a desk or a photo pinned to a corkboard carries the plot weight a conversation tree would carry elsewhere. The writers’ award makes sense once you see how much story is packed into silence.

The score is what holds it together. Holland’s music, scored for full orchestra, does what a voice cast would normally do: it tells you when to be uneasy, when a moment is tender, and when something is badly wrong. Mute it and Virginia becomes a much more confusing game. With it on, the game is often genuinely moving.

The Third Act Problem

Then the dreams take over. Surreal, dreamlike sequences grow steadily more frequent, blurring the investigation with Anne’s inner life until it is hard to say which one the game is about. This is where the Twin Peaks influence turns from mood into method. It is also where Virginia loses a large part of its audience.

The problem isn’t that the ending is ambiguous. Ambiguity is a legitimate artistic choice. The problem is that the procedural thread, which built so much tension early on, loses focus just as the editing speeds up. The two halves of Anne’s dual assignment stop pulling against each other and start dissolving into symbolism. Players who want closure on the Fairfax case will feel shortchanged. Players who enjoy decoding imagery will find plenty to argue about. We come down in the middle: the final act is visually striking and emotionally loud, but it is thinner than the setup earned.

Pacing and Value

Two hours is the right length for this story. Stretching it would have destroyed the editing rhythm that makes it work. But runtime still affects value, and the common complaint that the price is high for its length is reasonable. You are paying for a crafted, linear, one-time experience with little replay value beyond spotting details you missed. Judged as an evening of interactive cinema, it holds up. Judged as a game, it sits at the thin end of the spectrum.

Variable State chose a flat-shaded, low-poly look: chunky geometry, simplified faces and a strongly lit, saturated palette that turns small-town Virginia into something between a storybook and a fever dream. The style is smart for three reasons. It ages well. It keeps animation readable, which matters when body language does the work of dialogue. And it makes the dream sequences feel continuous with reality rather than jarring.

Faces are simple, but the animation is expressive enough that a shrug or a hesitation lands clearly. Lighting does a lot of the emotional work: warm diner interiors, sodium-orange roads at night, cold office fluorescents.

The UI is close to non-existent. There are no objective markers or HUD clutter, and interactable objects are marked with a subtle cue at the right moment. That is the right call for a game this committed to immersion.

Technically, a stylized 2D-scale game of this scope is light on hardware, and the design depends on cuts landing instantly. That matters more than it sounds: in a game built on jump cuts, a hitch during a transition would read as a bug rather than a choice. Players sensitive to rapid perspective changes should know that the editing is built to throw the camera into a new space with no warning, which can be briefly disorienting.

On Steam, Virginia runs on Windows and macOS. Mouse and keyboard are the natural fit. Fine mouse control makes it easy to scan a room quickly before the next cut takes it away, and since the game rarely lets you linger, that speed matters more here than in most narrative games. A controller works well too, and arguably suits the couch-and-headphones, one-sitting experience the developers had in mind.

There is no mechanical difference between platforms. The PS4 and Xbox One versions share the same content. But the reception split is worth noting: Steam’s user score runs well below the critic scores, and PC players buying short, linear stories have historically been the toughest crowd on value. A game this short also sits right at the edge of Steam’s two-hour refund window, which is an awkward place for a premium-priced experience to live. At a sale price, the value complaint mostly goes away.

Virginia is a landmark with a hollow centre. Its editing has already shaped the genre: it shows that a first-person game can cut, dissolve and montage like a film without falling apart. Holland’s score is among the best in the medium. The decision to tell the whole story without words pays off far more often than it should.

But a game is more than its direction. With almost nothing for your hands to do and a final act that drifts into symbolism just when the mystery needs tightening, Virginia asks for patience it doesn’t always repay. Critics were right to praise its ambition, and Steam players were right to question its value. We rate it a mixed recommendation: worth a look on sale, in one sitting, with headphones on, treated as a film that needs you to lean forward. On those terms, it is one of the more memorable two hours in narrative gaming — but for most players, that is not enough.