New indie studio Variable State announces Viriginia, a Twin Peaks-inspired "first-person interactive drama"

Virginia follows a pair of FBI agents investigating the disappearance of a young boy in the early 1990s. There's more to it than just that, however: Taking cues from popular TV series of the era like Twin Peaks and The X-Files, it promises a damn fine tale of the sort that's never been seen before.

Taking place from the first-person perspective of a newly-minted FBI agent on the hunt for a missing boy, Virginia is built around a simple, stark visual style and features a cast of "loners, has-beens, creeps and beatniks" inhabiting a rural America where nothing is quite what it seems.

"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," two-man indie team Variable State said in today's announcement. "Our missing person drama is set in a world both familiar and strange and tells a story unlike any featured in a game before."

Virginia is Variable State's first game but its founders, Jonathan Burroughs and Terry Kenny , have considerable experience between them. Burroughs' credits include Battlefield 2: Modern Combat, The House of the Dead: Overkill and Kinect Sports, while Kenny served as an animator on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Liberty City Stories.

All we've got to look at right now is a single screen and images of the two FBI agents at the center of the tale, but Variable State said that with the game now revealed, "We can start being more active talking about development and releasing news and the like." Virginia is currently slated to come out sometime next year.

Andy Chalk

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.