Rue Valley – Review – Groundhoug day mystery with a great style, and emotional baggage to boot

Our modern pop culture has an abundance of stories told about time loops through various media. I assume that everybody on this planet has seen the comedy Groundhoug day which had the funny man Bill Murray going about each day repeating, and finding ways not to go crazy while being trapped in the time loop. Of course, video games tend to use the similar gaming mechanic and narratives, such as The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and to name The Sexy Brutale as a recent gaming title that took a crack at it.

Now we have a new video game, under the title Rue Valley, which has time loop mechanics, and an emotional story. It’s also a first game made by a Serbian studio, Emotion Spark Studio, and it’s published by Owlcat Games. To be honest, it’s always hard to describe a story of a game that’s based on this type of a mechanic, it can spoil quite a lot.

You are Eugene Harrow, and you’ve started your therapy in a small city of Rue Valley. You are within the offices of your therapist, Dr. Finck. It’s 8:00, and you can clearly see that Eugene is quite an antsy guy. He doesn’t think these therapy sessions will be of help, but the good Dr. Finck, which notes your every twitch and reply in his small book, thinks he can help you out from the rut.

As you finish the therapy session you are out and about and you can see the first denizens of this quaint town, and to go inside your motel room. As you go by the day everything passes and nothing seems out of the ordinary. But then the sky goes ablaze and you wake up, at the good doctors office at the same time. Again, and again.

And from one loop, the timer is added in the upper right corner. This kicked my OCD hard, and got me sweating if i will be able to resolve all the story lines on time, due to the time limit which pinged ominously. Eugene wasn’t happy at all either, since he only has 47 minutes to go about and explore, and try to see if he can somehow come to a solution to this anomaly. And that would be the basic gist of the gameplay, you have these infinite loops with a short time span, that you need to plan around so you are able to check every nook and cranny of Rue Valley.

You’ll have 47 minutes to track down the info or items you need to move the story forward, and that’s where your character’s personality comes in. Instead of classic RPG stats like endurance or agility, Eugene is built around three psychological traits: Decisional, Emotional, and Social. At the start of the game, you get 9 points to distribute across these traits & you need to use them all, but you can’t dump all 9 into a single category. Your choices shape certain dialogue options, but don’t worry: no matter how you allocate your points, you’ll never be locked out of completing the game.

In the first playthrough, I’ve spent out points into Introverted and into Awkward trait. This made communication for Eugene with most of the characters harder due to his timid nature. Try to talk to a girl, you won’t be able to do it. Or ask for a simple thing like your room key, instead of asking immediately you will wait and sink in with the interior until the clerk notices you. But there’s always a workaround for these, let’s say the good doctor has within his bathroom a good dose of the old mothers milk that you can take a sip on, and presto you are the life of the party. For each build, there are nuances that bring in new dialogues and block options for the other traits, but they are balanced, but as a player you really get the experience how’s it like to be in Eugene’s shoes.

When you choose the Character Personality, it will be a fixed personality for Eugene, until the end of the game. But there are temporary changes which are made by status effects. When you start the game, you get one, total lack of motivation, which then makes Eugene highly introverted and depressed. And unable to do certain actions. But spread throughout the game there are various status effects which shall influence your personality and it’s traits, you get soaked, or drink something it may change them for a bit, for better or for worse.

The other tool that will matter the most, is the Mind Map. Within it you will be able to use it like a notebook to gather all of your findings about the happening within the loop and all the characters that you meet. Which can form into Intentions, which drive the narrative forward and give Eugene goals. You want to fix a broken coffee machine, or find out more about the mysterious Dr. Fink. You can do all of that with Intentions and the goals they set up. But to be able to finish these, you need to get Inspiration points. These are either handed out when you finish an Intention, or by searching the world and its surroundings and getting inspired.

Both of Character Personality and Mind Map have a refreshing designs which will push you to explore the Rue Valley and it’s denizens, but if Emotion Spark Studio get’s the chance to do another game, they definitely need to work on both of these and making them more interesting. I have a sense that if this wasn’t a loop kind of mechanic within the game, which pits you to experience similar events over and over, it would be appreciated more by hardcore type of players, that want to have their own way of finishing quests or leaving them unfinished. Instead, this comes to be quite a linear story, although with each playthrough sprinkled with new dialogue or interactions.

With Eugene, you can pass the time by playing simple games or scrolling an endless feed on your phone. It’s a small mechanic, but a smart one. Later in the game it becomes a practical tool for bypassing obstacles or solving quests with tech related issues. It’s refreshing to see modern technology used with purpose rather than as empty padding, which most games tend to do. There’s also a quiet commentary woven in, how easily we slip into digital distractions, and how we retreat into screens instead of facing the world around us.

Rue Valley is quite a small place in scale, and you will meet assortment of various denizens, that consists of 12 people. But although it’s smaller, it will bring you in abundance in character development (some are written better then the rest), and Eugene’s journey on how to cope with current loop predicament and why he got into therapy in the first place. Where the game excels the most is the portrayal of the main hero and his emotional baggage that’s spread out throughout this particular story.

This game has it’s moments, where it creeps on you and punches you in the gut, quite hard and mercilessly. Eugene’s troubles can be assorted to any human being, we’ve all been through different emotional rollercoasters and when the writing team puts their intentions and ideas to work, they shine brightly and effectively. And usually it can start in small details, his total uninterest with the people he meets, where he doesn’t call them by their names, but by their jobs.

As he gets to meet them, and starts seeing them as people of flesh and blood and not only thinking about his own predicaments, both we as a player and Eugene as the main hero open up and confront “our issues” and change our worldviews. This is a game about growing as a person, and finding a way to be accountable, and to move onwards. There aren’t that many games that communicate something like that to the players and hold a mirror to our faces, so we can do a reality check on ourselves. And this is something that the writer’s should be proud of, because with that they’ve succeeded.

Art design for the game is fantastical, if you ever wanted to be within a comic book, then this is the game for you. From the initial design of having the dialogue options set in the left side of the screen and having the dialogue comic like bubbles with the images of the characters that we interact with or just Eugene’s inner thoughts, and being able to flip them just like in the physical comic books and having that paper sound while changing the pages is a pretty, pretty cool design.

Same goes for the various background locations, be it the Motel, or the Max Gas pump or just the vistas with beautiful nature that you will be soaking up for the most of the time. When the change of the day happens, with the environmental effects such as rain, or simply the night falling down, and all the neon ads being lit. It oozes of a great style that it’s a bit strange that somebody else hasn’t tried out previously in similar games.

In regards of the characters, each of them has their own unique design, which is accentuated with the drawn motion lines that are all over their bodies, and they constantly jitter. Another nice touch to give out a comic book look, but also a way to present the mental state of our hero, due to constant stress and inner battles that he is going through.

Most of the characters are voiced by actors, for the most part they are quite solidly done, but there’s one character that sticks out and you meet them later in the game and they are an emotional core of this whole story. They should have also done the voice overs for all the dialogues. You may enter an interaction which starts with a voice, but after a few moments where you choose how you want to interact, there’s only text. The team should work and improve on this part since it brings up the quality of life of the game.

Soundtrack is done by Ana Krstajić and the following musicians, Dragan Gagi Hajnrih, Pera Krstajić, Milan Jejina Yeqy, and Savo Miletić, Luka Radovanović. These are mostly instrumental tracks that get the mood for each place you visit, or when you go into your trusty Yugo for a drive, a jazzy energetic track will get you all energetic and tapping your feet. But the song that will captivate you the most is the main title song: Footsteps. It’s catchy and emotional at the same time, and if it wasn’t made for Rue Valley, i could imagine to be a theme song for a cool tv show.

Gameplay-wise, it leans heavily into early 90’s point-and-click and visual novel design, and that comes with some quirks. A few quests left me stuck, not because I lacked ideas, but because the game insisted on a single, rigid solution. It felt tedious and repetitive, almost enough to make me stop playing. I get that these moments tie into the core loop mechanic, but they still come across as a cheap way to stretch playtime. Offering multiple paths to progress would’ve made the experience far more satisfying.

And an addition to be able to skip on the constant loading from going to one place to another would be quite helpful, especially in the last part of the game when the repetitiveness happens to take it’s toll. There’ are montages that help a bit later in the game to go through these sections, but still, somehow the whole section becomes sluggish, but i do get the intention behind it from the writing teams perspective.

During the game, there were couple of bugs , when the rain starts, and Harrow enters a brand new area and pulls of his hoodie, his hair would be missing entirely. I’ve also encountered on one playthrough an issue with a scene where a song needs to be played but nothing came of it. Within the second playthrough it worked fine. But other then that, I haven’t encountered any game breaking bugs or glitches.

I wanted to leave out comparisons with Disco Elysium, but I do get the idea that most people expect Rue Valley to be made in the exact same vein as the cult game. If you watched interviews with Marko Smiljanić the founder of Emotion Spark Studio and Chief Creative Director for the game, you probably learned that they got advice from the creators of Disco Elysium.

The DNA of that game can be found in smaller traces within Rue Valley, and it does contain several easter eggs, which are done out of respect. But I have to burst your bubble, if you want DE experience, you should lower your expectations and then, you shall be able to enjoy it much more and to treat it like it’s own thing. Sometimes it’s really tough to get out of a shadow from a much more influential game, especially when it set the standard bar so high, so keeping the fingers crossed that Rue Valley will communicate to the specific crowd of gamers.

What I would love to see as further steps from Emotion Spark Studio and Owlcat Games, is that they continue working on the game and making updates. Especially on the voice overs for all the characters, and to see if they can input a few new ways on how certain quests can be handled, and to give more back stories and dialogue to specific characters and in this way make the title more richer and broader appealing to the upcoming players.

As someone who enjoys the rich & compelling storytelling, I had a fun time with Rue Valley. It got me at certain story beats to think about what am I even doing with my life now. I chuckled at certain points, while some of them were quite gut wrenching and even made me teary eyed a bit. I think that Emotion Spark Studio, just scratched the itch with their first game & they will deliver an even more impressive title with the second one.