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The world is a maze, and the minotaur lurks at the centre. What form will it take? I shouldn't really talk about it. Everything about Virginia is a potential spoiler, and I want to spoil as little as possible. It's not even the plot so much as the manner in which things unfold that you'll want to come to entirely fresh. This daring headlong pelt of a narrative game has learned so much from the cinematic editing of Thirty Flights of Loving that it even gives it a reverent nod in the credits, but it has channelled that learning in a radically different direction. It's channelled it away from the breezy elliptical intrigue of Brendon Chung's box-headed crims (intrigue shot through with starbursts of beautiful sentimentality, granted) and towards a world of brittle relationships, difficult silences (how silent? the game is entirely without dialogue), and a brooding fixation on disappointment and complicity.
So, how much to say directly? A government agent pauses before a bathroom mirror, reaches for lipstick but then casts it aside after a moment's thought. Outside, in a landscape connected to the bathroom by fades and jump-cuts, a crime may have been committed in a small town. That's it for now. The rest is Virginia, a game in which the act of playing is as much about interpretation as it is walking around and investigating the people you meet and the places you go. A game in which there are no moment-to-moment puzzles, because the whole thing is a puzzle. The world is a maze, remember, and the minotaur...?
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