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.
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