Insgesamt hilfreichste Rezension

Posted on: November 14, 2025

Roahin

Spiele: 430 Rezensionen: 2

A Case Study in Missed Potential

I was excited for this game leading up to its release. Owlcat has a lot of goodwill currency with me, and even if they were only publishing and not developing, that alone was enough. The game and players all invite Disco Elysium comparisons and on a superficial level you can see the similarities. But it doesn't take long for the cracks to start to show. *SPOILERS AHEAD* The game is shockingly linear. When you begin with this seemingly open world sandbox of locations, people and infinite time loops to explore, it feels as though you can go anywhere and do anything. But the guardrails and forced narrative take effect pretty quickly. You're hurried through a series of increasingly repetitive tasks that never really quite seem to payoff. "Ask NPC A about X. Wait for the next timeloop. Ask NPC B about the information gained from NPC A. Wait for the next timeloop. Rinse and repeat." The tasks you're given never really seem to be relevant to the questions you have. Why are you in a timeloop? Why are you the only one who knows? Who are you in relation to this plot? Is the world ending at the end of every timeloop? Instead, you're treated to answering riddles of "Is the big hat lady selling her motel?" "Does the nerdy reception girl have a good relationship with her father?" and so on. This filler is dragged out for hours after hours after hours. Most of the time you don't feel like you're pursuing anything important, but just filling time. And then you discover that all the checks and stats are largely meaningless too. Whether you pass or fail them, the story continues on because it needs to and it's very linear. You'll find you quick paying attention to whether they pass or fail pretty much immediately because of how inconsequential they are. And then the ending. There really are no answers given. No big payoff. You're just a side character in someone else's story that you don't even see until the last few minutes. The how and the why, never answered. Your relation to the plot and what makes you so special, never answered. I don't know if that was supposed to be subversive or what, but imagine watching Groundhog Day through Ned Ryerson's perspective. Who would want to? This game was terrible. The premise and art, along with some of the soundtrack were quite good, so 2/5, but I'd strongly recommend avoiding this one. Also, if this is the quality of what Owlcat is publishing, I'll think twice about Shadow of the Road when it releases.

Hilft dir das weiter?

Posted on: November 14, 2025

doriancodes

Bestätigter Besitzer

Spiele: 35 Rezensionen: 7

Wannabe Disco Elysium missed the point

I was excited when I first played the demo few months ago. I was longing for the kind of feel and immersion that Disco Elysium delivered and I had the feeling that Rue Valley kind of went in that direction in terms of narrative, character development and even humor. I admit that it's unfair to compare games, but the comparison was advanced by the developers themselves, so maybe my expectations were unreasonably high. Anyway I bought the game just after release and after a few hours I immediately felt kind of cheated, because the ideas presented in the demo resulted highly undeveloped. It is as if the writers/designers put the pencils down when they finished the demo. Let's start with the narrative hook: the time loop. It is overdone. But the idea being this trope is that a single character has the freedom to shape their world around them without consequences. In Rue Valley you have very little interaction with the world. You can unlock story lines every time, but they are super linear and most of them don't advance the story. My guess is that they are there to complete the world, but the idea is so poorly executed that you hardly care about the other characters. They seem just to stand in your way. Plus after a few cycles, the repetition starts to wear you down. If you have such a simple plot, you have to stop everything and write better characters otherwise you are not giving anything to the player to be hooked up with. The characters have a superficial personality, but there is no depth to it. They are just there to give you information, access to items. When they open up with you it feels flat. Game mechanics: if you have played Disco Elysium, you will recognize similar mechanics. Dialogue screen, some of your attributes influence what you can say or do and the success of rolls. Plus you get some modifiers (not from clothes or consumables, but from statuses). If you think about this, it is a very strict system. It doesn't allow you to do much. The reason why this worked for Disco Elysium is because the internal landscape of the protagonist was exaggerated, his personality was big and weird, so while not giving the player much to work with actions, the game design gave a lot of freedom in terms of expression. In Rue Valley the protagonist is very flat, his problems are kind of generic and not very outlined, his emotions subdued. This make for very boring and uneventful monologues. I'm more than 10 hours in and I'll be honest, I don't know if I have the patience to finish this game. Maybe there is a turning point, but will it make up for the mediocrity I had to go through?

Hilft dir das weiter?

Posted on: November 16, 2025

tenacius_p

Bestätigter Besitzer

Spiele: 150 Rezensionen: 1

Ok game. mid ending

The most underwhelming ending I've played until now, feels like they had to cut development and we got this. The gameplay is ok. Although there are times where you're forced to repeat tasks for longer than necessary, just do it a few times to illustrate the time loop and then fast forward for player convenience. The ending made me wish I never played this game, missed opportunity of a great game, lots of missed opportunities in general. Get it at a discount if you really love time loops.

Hilft dir das weiter?

Edited on: December 3, 2025

Posted on: November 20, 2025

Louard_le_Barbare

Bestätigter Besitzer

Spiele: 297 Rezensionen: 127

Interesting, but could dig deeper

Rue Valley is worth a playthrough. It's a well-made game that tries something fresh... But also, does not quite measure up to its own ambitions. RV takes obvious cues from Disco Elysium: an isometric perspective, text-based gameplay, a neurosis-ridden protagonist whose actions are decidedly mundane and unglamorous... But it also manages to find its own footing first through a great art direction inspired by comic books, and second by locking its unmotivated hero in a time loop mechanic (akin to something like Majora's Mask). Through these repeated 47 minutes, the game becomes a moving journey about how our mental health either drives us or prevents us from moving on, about tightly-knit local communities, and all the battles the people around us fight without letting us in the known. The narrative here is genuinely gripping and relatable, and kept me going even when the gameplay was losing steam. 'Cause yeah, sadly Rue Valley... isn't really the RPG it sells itself as. I may change my mind if I ever replay it, but as of now my issue is that this game fails to build upon its base mechanics: character creation lets you select "traits", but their effects on conversations seem largely cosmetic and the skillchecks that do take advantage of them are infrequent, usually fail... and can never be reattempted, which is ABSURD for a time loop game! Overall, the design is deceptively linear: most problems can only be approached a single way, which usually involves jumping through a bunch of hoops while simpler alternate solutions stare you in the face. That's not great for a genre supposedly built on player choices. Rue Valley's story is about how failure is not the end and can still lead to good things, and well... That's pretty true of the game itself: it doesn't quite succeed at what it tries to do, but at least its heart is in it and the result is commendable. It's a nice indie title, just not the great story-based RPG you may have hoped. Buy it when the price drops under 20 bucks.

Hilft dir das weiter?

Edited on: November 19, 2025

Posted on: November 19, 2025

pcgamehunter

Bestätigter Besitzer

Spiele: 625 Rezensionen: 12

Decent game with a disappointing ending

The first half of the game is quite good, the loop is introduced, a ton of questions are thrown at you and then it lets you target several lines of questioning at once. It feels like your personality both helps and hinders you and that there is a underlying meta-game of controlling your mood via actions and consumables to succeed at different tasks. Sadly this unravels around the mid point of the game. The consumables become bugged and ultimately irrelevant. The lines of questioning quickly dry up and you become stuck on one thing for many loops, as each loop gets more frustrating. The answers to key mysteries were unsatisfying, feeling like red herrings with little to replace them. The saddest part for me, is that I genuinely enjoyed the emotional parts of the story, but when placed back into the time loop mystery and remembering the original hook, it felt like there were two stories competing for space and one of those won at the expense of the other. The gameplay is what you'd expect, you cycle between reading dialogue, interacting with the world and committing to and ticking off different intentions within the mind map, while jumping from loop to loop as needed or when your time runs out. The art is great, the comic book style is really well made, only occasionally hurt by animation bugs. The sound design is pretty good in that "don't notice its there" kind of way, it simple, clean and fit the setting well. The music is really good, with certain tracks elevating the great parts of the writing even higher. The voice acting is pretty good, not all dialogue is voiced however. I only really disliked one of the character's voices. **FULL SPOILER WARNING** The core dilemma with Rue Valley is that its interpersonal story of Eugene Harrow, the inhabitants of Rue Valley, grief, mental illness and therapy are at odds with its time loop mystery. The interesting parts like why is Eugene in therapy, what are Coral Destiny truly up to and how are they related to the loop, all end up feeling like red herrings, that leave a much less interesting story behind. Coral Destiny had a space mission 2 years ago and all the astronauts died, that's the extend of their mystery. They seemingly didn't do anything wrong, I don't even remember learning what actually went wrong in the first place. The loop ending with one of their rocket launches is just a coincidence. The time loop 'just happened' because Frank couldn't move on from his partner Judy, who was on that mission and left behind audio logs, which made him believe she's alive, stuck in orbit. So the time loop is almost like a metaphor for someone chasing ghosts of their past out of grief, being stuck, unable to move on in life. Eugene's reason for being in therapy is he had a mental breakdown while stuck in an elevator during an important deadline and accidentally set it on fire while trying to escape. The way the story presents some of these revelations was actually quite good, but thinking about the story after finishing it, I just can't help but feel disappointed with how much it threw away.

Hilft dir das weiter?

Entdecke CD PROJEKT RED-Spiele

Highlights

Featured

Nah dran, aber keine exakte Übereinstimmung

Rue Valley

Andere Bewertungen

Deine Rezension hinzufügen

Deine Rezension bearbeiten

Diese Rezension löschen?

Diese Rezension melden

Zusätzliche Details (erforderlich):

Diese Rezension melden