Damn Fine! Twin Peaks-ish, X-Files-y Virginia Announced

Virginia was made for me, you need to understand. Other '90s weird kids might feel that too, but it's for me. A weird first-person "interactive drama" with low-fi untextured polygons and a period story inspired by Twin Peaks and The X-Files? It couldn't be for anyone else.

Two FBI agents (two non-white ladies, unless I'm mistaken) investigating a missing child in a small town where the locals are weird and the cherry pie's "damn fine" is an idea I adore so much I threatened Alec (me! me who rejects absolutely revenge, aggression, and retaliation) when he considered writing about the game's announcement himself.

"Inspired by our collective love of 90s TV dramas like Twin Peaks, The X-Files and The Outer Limits, we wanted to create a game which captured their mixture of the inexplicable, the absurd and the mundane," developers Variable State explain. "Our missing person drama is set in a world both familiar and strange and tells a story unlike any featured in a game before."

It'll be important for Virginia to establish its own identity, of course, to be more than a collection of references. Deadly Premonition only came alive when it stepped out of Twin Peaks' shadow. Mentioning that stuff at the start is the best way to get coverage of your announcement from suckers like me, though.

Variable State is Jonathan Burroughs and Terry Kenny, who met through AI company DeepMind--one of the many AI/robotics companies Google has eerily acquired. Before then and before going indie, they worked on games including B movie pastiche The House of the Dead: Overkill, which Burroughs wrote and was a designer on. Music's coming from Lyndon Holland, whose portfolio seems to go heavy on the weird and melancholy.

(Say, does this living room remind you of the Hayward family's in Twin Peaks?)

They plan to release Virginia next year. Look, look at how beautiful this game is: