Watch: How Virginia's cutthroat editing makes it a more cinematic game
Eye witness.
As Donlan pointed out in his review last week, Virginia is a pretty special game. It's also fiendishly difficult to talk about without spoiling, but suffice it to say that Virginia is an exemplary piece of narrative design.
One of the things that really struck me about Virginia, however, is how cinematic it is. I don't mean that as in it constantly seizes control of your camera to make sure you see a helicopter explode in slow motion (à la Call of Duty). Rather, it's cinematic because it's not afraid to trim sequences right down to the bone. Virginia is a very well edited game.
It's far easier to explain what I mean by showing you, so fire up the video below to see a couple of examples of the ways in which Virginia toys with your sense of continuity.
I've gone to special effort not to reveal anything about the story, by the way, so you can rest assured that the video is entirely spoiler-free.