How to Play Rue Valley - Review

There is a note plastered to the motel room wall next to the bathroom. Eugene had been here for a few days but just noticed it now of all times, when a loud thunder clap knocked the power out for a brief moment, an enraged tow truck driver tore out of the parking lot swearing and slamming into a generator on his way, and a fireball engulfed the night sky, threatening to consume everything.

None of that was new to me though because in Rue Valley, you’re stuck in a time loop, reliving the same 47 minutes between 8:00 and 8:47pm. Each loop you wake up in therapy and end with the fiery apocalypse. Or at least that’s what it seems. Visually and mechanically, Rue Valley evokes Disco Elysium. Create your Eugene with personality points along three spectrums, Decisional, Social, and Emotional, making him either impulsive or calculated, introverted or extroverted, sensitive or indifferent. Each of these stats activates a quirk when leveled to a certain point that either unlocks or blocks certain dialogue options. For example having the Dramatic quirk will allow you to say you think you’re a hopeless loser in therapy who will die alone and soon, but having the Reckless quirk will *not* allow you to check the caller ID before answering your phone. This mechanic intrigued me more than anything else in Rue Valley, and I hope to see it again in future games from newcomers Emotion Spark Studio.

So I knew everything outside would happen but I hadn’t yet interacted with this note on the wall. I click it, Eugene saunters over and the game informs me, “no time to read this- you need to figure out what’s really going on.” Got it, the game is a mystery, there is a central mystery I have to solve, and this note is meaningless.

Clicking on anything else in the room prompts a, “feels unimportant right now,” text box so I walk Eugene outside as seems to be my only option. Sure enough it’s raining, there appears to be signs that a truck rushed away, and we are in fact in a time loop. Everything we already saw from the loop before.

Ironically, the note on the wall was a long list of rules for the motel, each increasingly absurd like only one pillow per bed, no exceptions, no whistling after 8pm (so the entirety of the time the game takes place within the loop), etc. I can’t even tell you all of the rules because after clicking on a few of them to read, the game decided for me that there were just too many to care about, despite having the option to click on any I wanted prior to that. Even going back to the list on subsequent loops, I wasn’t able to interact with it further. The rules of the game decided that I, the player, was done reading the rules and even labelled me a rule breaker.

“The rules stare down at you, judging. They know you’re breaking them.” This is the message I get each time I try to read the note now, however it’s not in reference to anything I’ve done other than trying to play the game in a way that makes sense to me and the character I’ve assigned a personality. Time and again I tried to interact with things, be certain places at certain times, or create scenarios with new information, but the restrictions of the 47 minute loop and inconsistencies in the narrative design kept me railroaded to specific actions or outright broke the logic of the timeline.

In one loop, for example, I overheard the receptionist, Robin, speaking with another guest who has an important meeting to call into, but the motel internet is down. She offers him a bike that’s leaning against the motel just outside to get to her mom’s nearby restaurant to use the WiFi there which he accepts. However on the next loop, I tried to go to his room to speak to him about his dilemma before that point, but the only dialogue option was, “sorry, wrong room.” When I went to go sit on a bench to pass time for when he does leave on the bike, the descriptive text reads, “he left in a hurry. I wonder where he’s going,” as if I hadn’t heard the conversation the loop before.

I was continually reminded of the rules plastered on the walls of each motel room and felt the connection between them and the ones coded into the game. Everything pointed to there being a right and wrong way to play. Being told what’s important and what isn’t pushed me toward specific actions, and when I did try to come up with my own solutions, the game seemed to pretend I didn’t as it would have broken the intended order of events.

The characters that surround the story are all quirky themselves and add life to Rue Valley as they enter and part on their specific timelines, and their voice acting is a welcome touch. Robin in particular is a lively people pleaser just itching at all times for something to do or someone to talk to as she deals with her own emotional turmoil and seemingly runs the motel mostly on her own.

Eventually, a mystery within the mystery of the time loop and the sky explosion opens up the story with tantalizing new theories, but they come just a bit too late and after too much railroading to finally get you there. By then I felt I was still forcing myself along, knowing playing Eugene as the Eugene I had attempted to create was meaningless.

As a debut, Rue Valley is ambitious. It evokes Disco Elysium and similar CRPG’s in a major disservice to what expectations should be. The time loop and linearity of the story undermine the RPG elements, and the player often feels unwelcome in the developer’s world. The personality the player assigns to Eugene at the beginning shapes his responses in an interesting mechanic that blocks or unlocks responses, but those options don’t matter much in the end, as the game’s code has strict rules about what you can and can’t do at any given time. I’d love to see this mechanic developed further in a future game where there are consequences to choosing to arrogantly scream at a receptionist, but this is not such a game. This game is about rules, following them closely loop after loop, and being labelled a rule breaker anyway.

Leave a comment