![]() Cult or Conspiracy?īefore we get there though, it’s important to consider the possibilities that surround the game’s finale. ![]() Lucas’ knowledge was inconvenient then, but it is not clear precisely what happened to him until, perhaps, the game’s end. Indeed, it is Lucas’ hobby that may be what gets him into trouble: among the hanging pictures that Anne finds are snaps of the boy’s father engaged in an affair, and the location of what ends up being a meeting point for a group of very shady people. Not an ideal one to have in a town where all sorts of people have plenty to hide. It becomes clear earlier on, when Anne stumbles on his secret development lab, that Lucas has a hobby: photography. On the one hand, Lucas represents a fulcrum that Anne’s conscience sways on, and on the other he acts as a torch shining through the darker and uglier aspects of Kingdom’s community – much in the same way that the character Laura Palmer managed in one of the game’s biggest benefactors, Twin Peaks. The missing boy at the heart of the story, Lucas is a very present figure throughout the narrative despite his absence. Anne’s fears are firstly that the boy may have been killed, and secondly that her actions burning the box are akin to what may have happened to Lucas in Kingdom. Lucas may have been put into the furnace – figuratively – by someone who needed him out of the picture. The crucial thing to take away here is that Anne is terrified that Lucas may well have gone the same way. The furnace stands in the middle of the road ahead of her on the floor leading up to it, there are scattered missing persons posters with Lucas’ face on them. How bad could it possibly have been? How much does she trust her father? She is terrified of what might have been in the box good men usually don’t need things burned.ĭuring one particularly disturbing sequence, Anne dreams of a deserted highway at night. This furnace then becomes a recurring image in Anne’s mind. Appearing periodically in Anne’s dreams, the furnace serves as a constant reminder of the choice she made to protect her father and of the mystery that continues to haunt her as to what exactly was burned. ![]() Anne doesn’t look inside the box – perhaps afraid of what she might find – and puts it in a furnace. The cardboard box that she is to burn is housed within a more secure metal one, and the key to this metal box is what her father gives to her. His condition is presumably fatal because he asks her to do something unusual for him: to burn a box that he has in his closet. When Anne became an FBI officer, she proudly went to tell her father, who was ill in a hospital bed. Perhaps the most important symbol tied to Anne is the broken key that she carries through the game, the first large piece of the puzzle to her character. Most of what then springs forth from this simple plot is channeled through the game’s protagonist, Anne, and so this is where we will explore most of the game’s clues and imagery. The Fairfax case leads both agents down a rabbit-hole as they discover a secret society operating in Kingdom, Virginia. Halperin has been consigned – Fox Mulder style – to the basement office, and is clearly a pariah. ![]() In BriefĪnne Tarver is a freshly christened FBI agent at the game’s beginning, and is quickly assigned to two cases: the search for a local missing boy – Lucas Fairfax – and the investigation of a fellow agent – Maria Halperin. ![]() If you have just completed it the once then go back and take a second trip to kingdom to see what ideas leap out at you. One note before you read on: it is a game that, perhaps more than any other, benefits from multiple playthroughs. To bastardize Andy Warhol: instead of asking, ‘what is real?’ ask, ‘what is good?’ As such, the ambiguity over some of the game’s ideas isn’t worth coming down on either way: sitting on the fence and accepting dual possibilities will only net you a richer experience. The truth is tinged with fiction and crucially, the fiction is imbued with a deeper truth. Sometimes it’s apparent that what you are seeing isn’t real other times it isn’t quite so clear. Virginia is a game that inseparably mixes abstract, surreal imagery – often prized from dreams or hallucinations – with the reality of its plot. ![]()
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