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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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