Incline Virginia, by Variable State - An adventure game for deaf people

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Virginia is a thriller set in 1992, inspired by Fargo, Twin Peaks, True Detective and X-Files.
The protagonists are two FBI agents, Anne Traver and Maria Halperin, who must investigate about the disappearance of a boy,
in the small and fictional town of Kingdom, Virginia.

The particularity of the game is that the characters don't speak, but instead they gesticulate.
Visually, the source of inspiration seems to be Firewatch.
The game will be released for PC, PS4 and Xbox One on 22/09/2016, and a demo is already available on Steam.

Here's the trailer:



And here's a gameplay of the demo:

 

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The music of the trailer is really good.

I'm definitively interested.
Probably a

 

[Outlander]

Virginia is a thriller set in 1922, inspired by Fargo, Twin Peaks and X-Files.

the characters don't speak, but instead they gesticulate.

 

[GrainWetski]

Didn't know deaf people can't read. The more you know!

 

[SerratedBiz]

Looks linear as fek.

 

[Rahdulan]

Tried the demo, looks artsy enough. Might buy for $5 later down the road because HOLY FUCK THERE'S A BUFFALO IN MY ROOM some of the visuals looked interesting. They should ditch letterboxing, though. I don't care how cinematic you're trying to make your game seem that shit just distracts me from playing the damn thing when it's up there all the time.

 

[garren]

is this one of them artsy walking simulator no-games?

 

[Gambler]

The visuals look good (including art style and animation), the music sounds good too, there is definitely some intrigue... But I don't see why the game wouldn't have normal dialogs, at least in text. Seems like an arbitrary and rather silly limitation that simply spoils the fun.

I guess a valid reason to not have any dialog is to create a game that is entirely self-paced. Dialog either imposes a strict limitation on pacing, or requires a weird convention, used by most RPGs and adventures these days where speaking pauses everything else.

Another valid reason is to emphasize natural sounds and visuals. Speech and text do detract from those things... But the problem is, real life does have speech. So it's a bit like making a game where you see everything in infrared. Clever, but meaningless at the same time.

One thing you loose with text and dialog is a strong presence of the main character(s), their thoughts, their "mental filter" through which everything passes. Which is one of my favorite things about adventure games. Which is why I'm not a huge fan of Myst-like games.

Also, this game doesn't look particularly interactive. Everything I've seen in the demo play-through was simple and linear actions.

 

[taxalot]

Our national newspapers are absolutely enchanted with this game and have many great things to say about it, which means it has shitty gameplay.