Rue Valley

There are some good ideas in Rue Valley's depressioncore time loop, but the execution makes it feel more like a chore than a charm.

Rue Valley excels in brief snippets, but forces players through long spans of laborious exploration.

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I wish it hadn't squeezed such interesting ideas and a compelling concept (though clearly inspired by Disco Elysium) into a package that fails to excite much and occasionally feels like a time-waster due to some of its mechanics. While Rue Valley could have been so much more, it seems content with being just average.

Overall, Rue Valley gets off to a very strong start, and after a brief period of uncertainty, it manages to bring the story to a satisfying close. When it came to choosing and shaping our personality, I felt the developers missed a few genuinely promising opportunities, but I didn’t regret at all being there alongside Eugene during one of the long, at times painfully self-honest hours of his life.

Rue Valley is a mixed bag. Its strongest moments are getting to grips with Eugene’s situation, learning the character’s routines, and the initial sense of mystery and intrigue. Regretfully, it doesn’t stick to landing due to a rough and utterly boring final stretch. If you want an RPG, you aren’t really going to get one here.

With Disco Elysium being one of my all-time favourite games, I was eager to check out Rue Valley with all of its similarities and although it does not stand side-by-side with it, it does have its own merits. As such, I encourage you to give it a go and see how you can make your 47-minute time-loops make a difference in a town filled with drama, looming corporations, family feuds, and even a possible alien or two.

Ultimately, Rue Valley is a frustrating experience, with too many loose ends and unresolved arcs at the end of the game. It’s unable to make the most of its excellent setup, faltering in the mid and late game stages as you’re forced between slow montages and extremely specific puzzle sequences. It’s a game with great writing and some truly fantastic ways of exploring depression and mental health, but it mechanically falls flat.

Rue Valley is a good title that will surely appeal to fans of Disco Elysium and CRPGs in general, thanks to its refined artistic style, engaging soundtrack and impeccable writing of the protagonist, capable of creating a strong emotional bond with the player. The time rewind mechanic is well implemented, adding depth to the gameplay and encouraging exploration and experimentation. However, the game can be disappointing due to the lack of depth in the choices, which rarely affect the plot, and the apparent uselessness of the skill system. Added to this is a story that, after a promising start, and underdeveloped secondary characters, seem to quickly exhaust their narrative potential. All this makes the work, despite its merits, a wasted opportunity, especially in terms of dynamic storytelling and engagement through choices.

A time loop adventure with an interesting premise and characters, but a frustratingly rigid structure that fails to resolve most of the stories it sets up.