The dedicated, or trained, watch and look. They observe before they act.
That’s the message I convince myself of before I booted up the Virginia demo for the second time.
My first time playing the demo had felt rushed, hasty. I had felt like I had been taking snap-second decisions simply because I was prompted with an interaction icon. In fact it had clocked in at about ten minutes, which – as it turned out – matched my second outing of the game. I had played it like a mystery game of sorts, a silent journey through an adventure with multiple paths and a story that you could scratch away at by observing carefully and interacting with everything you could. I wasn’t left disappointed, per se, but I felt as though I’d missed a lot of moments.
Virginia’s demo is a slice of the game, not the start, not the middle, not the end. It is like catching the ten-to-fifteen minutes section of a pilot television show; the detectives don’t know each other well, they don’t know the town, and they definitely don’t know the victim. On the same par, you as a viewer are cut from the opening moments; you don’t know the characters, there is no cold open showing a murder or a body being pulled from the stream, there is no “This is detective Ortega, I mean, Halperin” punctured with steely glares, there is no sweeping shot showing the town of Kingdom cresting over Fox Hill as the characters approach. That, that is one of the main reasons I am replaying the demo now.
This is a game with a tight, linear narrative, if you’re going to play the demo and don’t want it’s fleeting moments spoiled, then don’t read on ahead, as I’ll discuss and speculate on those almost erratically.
Kingdom is a small -former- mining town somewhere along the Washington terminating ME-220, Virginia. When the mine shut down in ’65 it’s likely the town suffered massively, however the U.S Air Force opened up a base on the same side of town as the old mine, nearly over the top of the entrance, and in close proximity to the observatory on the hill. On the other side of town Miller’s creek meanders around a cliff edge, turning away from the Old Bison Trail to wrap off away from town. All of this information can be told from the tourist map (dated 1984) that serves as the background for the main menu for the game; it also tells us that the town was settled two-hundred years before the map was made, although it’s appearance doesn’t betray a town that grew in the shadow of a mine.
The logo of the game though, with it’s scarlet bird perched on the final letter of Virginia, does at least nod towards a few themes which start to peek through in the quarter of an hour’s moments that we are privy to. The importance of the mines, wherein mines normally used caged birds to check for deadly gases (as birds would succumb to the gas before people). The red bird is likely a cardinal, rather than the canaries regularly used in British mines, however it is a local, and distinctive, bird which underlines the second theme. Nature.
Nature as a mysterious alien thing, not just made unknown by modern technologies, but also a spiritual or even science-fiction-esque way. The bison that jolts your attention not once, but twice, and also the cardinal itself, have ties to early Native American culture. And, of course, the missing boy, Lucas, has his drawings of aliens which were no doubt scribbled down during his long nights hiding out in the old mine, near the -no doubt secretive- military base, and also near the observatory.
There’s ultimately more mysteries left by the demo than solved; the second shot of the sequence is your partner telling the missing boy Lucas’ parents about his death, yet moments later while waiting in the petrol station, a car pulls up adjacent being driven by a person (later seen in the family home during a dream sequence) who is clearly the dead boy, or a twin, or a doppelganger. Also, Lucas’ parent’s hair colours are ginger and auburn, while the boy himself has hair of the pitchest black; in fact this makes the sheriff – H. Taft – stick out further than his uniform already did; his hair is exactly the same colour as Lucas’. Then there’s the fact that the FBI are handling the investigation, and that you are investigating your partner. Vastly more questions asked than answered, and it feels outstanding.
Listed inspirations for the game include True Detectives, Twin Peaks, and (the delightful) Thirty Flights of Loving. It’s clear to see the influences; Twin Peak’s small-town-big-mystery formula straddled with the supernatural lodges, (Don S Davis as) Briggs and his mysterious military project, and of course the involvement of the FBI in a small town’s problem; True Detectives’ powerfully acted mismatching of protagonists, solving problems in unexpected, unusual ways despite their problems; and of course Thirty Flights of Loving’s film like cuts and narrative, yanking the story along by cutting out the chaff in between. Between them they also all tell of a world beneath another world, be it through dreams, feelings, or simply by showing that world through the cracks. Another title that shares a lot of these is The X Files, although it often juxtaposes the two worlds, and unlike the other examples the narrative is often led through words rather than discovery through action.
Was my second playthrough any different? No, it wasn’t, although I changed the pace of my journey, checking everywhere before I moved on through the scene-change triggering items I found nothing that added any extra clues. That said, I still really enjoyed the second playthrough, actually more so than the first; I took more care, found more feathers, (a mysterious, possible collectable) and actually mentally connected the boy in the car, and the living room, with the missing son.
The entire game, from what has been said, lacks even a single word, but it’s something that isn’t needed. As discussed previously, progression through investigation and exploration, quick cutting between moments, hard breaks from dreams, these all have shown in the demo that they can drive the story forward well enough, and actually creates more of a reliance on, and impact of the facial expressions or facings and movements of the characters; the remorse, maybe guilt, on the face of the sheriff; the concern and disappointment of Halperin; the wandering, knotted thoughts of the smoking girl.
Virginia launches on the 22nd of September, for Windows PC, Mac, Xbox One & PS4. There’s a demo currently live on Steam, give it a shot.
