Virginia

I remember hearing about Virginia a long time ago in the same sentences as words such as ‘original’, ‘good’, ‘amazing’ and ‘easy Gamerscore.’ I played the game through twice, still didn’t get it, read an internet plot synopsis and still didn’t get it but it turns out someone sort of did. So I realised that Virginia wasn’t to my tastes so if you liked it, take the rest of this review with a pinch of salt.

Virginia is classed as a Point and Click adventure game but it may as well be a visual novel for the level of pointing and clicking you need to do. The story is told through speechless scenes where some kind of overly complex multi-layered story plays out in front of you. You play as Anne Tarver, an FBI agent who is tasked with carrying out an internal investigation on Maria Halperin for no real reason. You partner up with her to try and solve the case of missing child Lucas and then some arbitrary stuff happens like you become friends with Maria, then she finds out about the investigation and falls out with you, then you make up and bin off the FBI… so they throw you in jail? A lot of this would have been easier to understand had they put speech in, but whatever.

The article I read provided some insights into the plot holes but essentially it’s just guess work from someone who liked the game. I’m not sure if the developers had the idea at the outset that their story was so disconnected (and they throw in an unnecessary acid trip at the end) that the players would be expected to make up their own ending and answer the unanswered questions themselves but that’s not why 80% of people watch TV and it’s not why I play games. I’m all for using intelligence to figure stuff out for myself but not to this level. It feels like lazy story telling.

Gameplay wise, all I have to say is that Anne has got zero pace and zero options for faster movement. You have to walk around and click on various things to progress through scenes. There are optional collectibles but even these are bizarre and I’ll cover them below.

Graphically, it doesn’t look good. It’s blocky an unappealing on the eye however some people have praised it so this is clearly personal taste.

In summary, it doesn’t look good, it doesn’t have dialogue and the music it does have is irritating and the story is a clusterfuck of shit followed by an acid trip. I have no idea where the good opinions came from.

Achievement – 1,000 Points – 17 Achievements

Viriginia requires two playthroughs to complete for the simple reason that one of the achievements is for completing it twice. The rest can be gathered in a single two-hour playthrough but you need to know where the collectibles are to do this.

You get one for default by playing the game through for the first time. There are ten feathers and ten flowers to collect throughout the adventure and a load of other random stuff too.

All of the other stuff you have to collect doesn’t actually unlock anything. After you collect them, you need to see said items in situ. An example of this is where you pick up a pair of glasses. These glasses will then appear on another character and you have to see the other character wearing them for an achievement. This is where it gets stupid because, obviously, why can pick up a pair of glasses only for them to appear on the face of another random character?

I used a guide to ensure I didn’t miss anything and some of this stuff didn’t unlock at the same points for all players. Mine were pretty much all delayed until the end of the game. With the collections, once you have all ten flowers and all ten feathers, you then need to view them in your apartment towards the end of the game for the achievements to unlock.

This is a minor point but the achievement names and descriptions don’t tell you anything about what you have to do to unlock them so in effect, they are all secret achievements.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I didn’t enjoy Virginia and if this is 505 Games’ idea of a game, I won’t be playing any more of their titles. It is less than a four-hour completion for achievement hunters but it’s an unengaging, unrewarding, uninteresting completion.

Knee Deep

The next title in my randomly generated picks is Knee Deep, a game that came with a package of Wales Interactive Games along with the previously reviewed Late Shift.

Knee Deep is a visual novel so just give me a few minutes to find and re-read my Three Fourths Home review… okay done. Knee Deep is somewhat of an improvement over that pile of shite and not just because all of Knee Deep’s achievements unlocked when they were supposed to. It still hasn’t enamoured me to the visual novel genre but did show that Three Fourths Home is a blip even by the genre’s own standards. I wasn’t looking for another visual novel game to play – it was just cheaper to get the other games I wanted in a bundle.

Anyway, Knee Deep is a visual novel game where you are effectively watching a play with actors and you have to make dialogue decisions with three different protagonists – well, technically four but you spend the majority of the game following three of them so we will stick with three.

The story, after having played through the first act three times, is bizarre to the point of stupidity and that’s without going into the dialogue choices. I suppose revealing the end, even if the end makes no sense in its own context, is a spoiler so here is the warning.

What starts out as a murder investigation turns into exposing a political cover up. But in a dramatic twist, it turns out the political cover up is just a front for… bringing the dead back to life. In the form of a half-zombie. And then the town is swallowed by a sink hole. You can’t make this stuff up. Although, Knee Deep’s universe is proof that you actually can.

Turning to the characters themselves and the dialogue options, each of the three characters you control has a dialogue trait that allows you to play the game as a total freak. Romana can just say something strange in response to stuff, Jack can make belligerent comments and KC can make cynical comments. This was actually quite good at first but on multiple playthroughs, it gets exposed.

You are told as the start of the game that you cannot ‘lose’ but your choices change how people react to you. This is true in mini segments. You can be as strange or belligerent towards people as you want but they will inevitably go back to a fixed track dialogue that’s so lazily done, it makes no sense half the time. An example of this is when Romana makes strange comments, some people call her weird whereas others just churn out their pre-determined speech as if saying ‘Pineapple’ for no reason is perfectly normal.

Gameplay wise, there isn’t a lot. There are four, maybe five, bits where you have to do the computer game equivalent of a mini jigsaw puzzle but that’s it. The rest is incessantly clicking through endless, and sometimes pointless dialogue.

The game also had a few glitches when I played. Sometimes a puzzle would start and the game would move on in the background and characters would talk over what was happening. On one of my subsequent playthroughs, when I skipped some dialogue, the character didn’t seem to like this and just carried on talking anyway.

The menus and dialogue selections are very clunky too. It felt like the game wasn’t ready for me to press buttons at certain points and I would have to press a button twice to select a dialogue choice or wiggle the analogue stick a lot to see if the menu was active. And even then, there was no guarantee the cursor would move to where I wanted it to go. It felt a lot like poor design.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 43 Achievements

All of the achievements can be put into three categories. Story Related; Multiple Pathways and continuous selection.

There are 16 achievements for running through the game from start to finish and you will get some of the multiple-choice ones as you do.

Turning to the continuous selection ones, there are 9 achievements here. With your three characters, you have to select strange, cynical or belligerent dialogue options at every opportunity. If you don’t miss any, all 6 will unlock by the end of the second act. There are 2 achievements for each character. The bigger pain in the ass are the other three. You make reports as you play the game that show the public what’s happening in the story and these reports can either be cautious, edgy or inflammatory. You have to continuously select the same style of report to get three separate achievements associated with the styles. Thankfully this only applies to the first act. I think I would have killed myself if I had to play through the full game three times.

The other multiple pathways ones can all be obtained by leaving to the main menu after the first achievement unlocks and reloading. This is only really necessary in Act III since you have to play Act I three times anyway and there are no missables in Act II. The most notable ones for these involve taking an Opto test as both Romana and Jack. There are three outcomes for each character and you have to get all three for six achievements. Jack also has a belligerent response instead of taking the test so this one is actually 4 choices.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Knee Deep was a straight forward game completion that I did actually enjoy for the first couple of hours. It’s funny in places too but the dialogue inconsistencies and pretentious nature of some of the humour somewhat zapped my enjoyment. The last two partial playthroughs were not fun either. Still, for the achievement hunters, it’s an effortless 100%.