Rue Valley is like a less cheerful Disco Elysium, somehow | Hands-on preview

Given the monumental critical success of ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium, it’s surprising more developers haven’t at least tried to replicate it. Granted, it may well be a case of catching lightning in a bottle even for its own devs, and the writing is so ridiculously good that attempting to emulate it would very easily produce something pretentious or overwrought, but nothing in this world stays unique for long. Hence, perhaps, the arrival of Rue Valley, a game that certainly wears its Disco Elysium influences on its sleeve, even if it struggles to capture the effortless existentialism of ZA/UM’s game.

Where Rue Valley intentionally differs is in its central premise. You’re no detective, for a start; you’re Eugene Harrow, a depressive loner who has travelled to the Rue Valley motel to undergo some kind of court-ordered therapy. We don’t know what he did to bring him here, but it’s implied that it was something pretty bad. The preview build I played was short and very light on details or intrigue, leaving me with no idea what happened or if what happened will turn out to even be that interesting. It’s not the best direction for a preview to take, but we’ll know more when Rue Valley enters early access.

What is intriguing is the core conceit: Eugene is stuck in a time loop, repeating the same 47 minutes of an evening over and over. In the preview we got to experience only two loops, the first and second. It begins with you creating Eugene’s personality from a bunch of sliders that I simply don’t understand. And not mechanically, but with what’s on them. You have three sliders, each with four traits on them such as Impatient and Reckless on one side, and Indecisive and Paranoid on the other. Not only are these traits not opposites, but you can’t really help but make Eugene a bit of a dick. You have 9 points to spend, and if you put 3 into the left side of the first bar you can swap Impatient and Reckless so that becomes his primary trait. So you can end up with someone who is both Impatient and Indecisive, Secretive and Arrogant, Dramatic and Unkind. There just aren’t many positive attributes to choose from.

Whichever you choose have a direct effect on actions Eugene can and can’t perform, so if you choose to make him Secretive you can’t use certain dialogue options, for example. In this part of the loop you can choose how to behave with the Psychiatrist at the start, but no matter what I did Eugene ends up with the “Lack of Motivation” status effect. This means you can’t do certain things, and must kind of just do whatever Eugene feels like.

So I went out of the doctor’s office and entered reception, where I had to wait for the receptionist to finish her phone call. I got Eugene to play on his phone and stare out of the window until she was done, but as I had chosen Indecisive the first time I couldn’t hurry her up and had to sit. It’s a good representation of a person paralysed by their own self, but it doesn’t make for a very exciting game. There’s not much intrigue here. The second time I played I was Reckless and Unkind, so I was able to interrupt her phone call and snatch the keys off her. But it changed nothing – that I saw, anyway.

Outside is a girl kicking the vending machine as though it doesn’t work, even though it works for Eugene later. No matter what I did in my playthroughs of the preview, Eugene wouldn’t approach her in either of the loops as she was too angry. After heading to his room, you can make Eugene unpack his suitcase, drink the horrible brown water from the taps, or go to sleep. There’s a weird phone call here that sets up some mystery for later, and then you’re awakened by a loud car. Leaving the room in a storm you see an angry driver crash his car and then drive off. Shortly after, the sky turns red and Eugene awakens in the shrink’s office ready to start the loop again.

Throughout this you’re given “checks” that suggest the game is rolling a dice behind the scenes. Maybe it’s the preview build, but in three playthroughs and maybe a dozen of these checks, I didn’t win a single one. Not one. So I’ve no idea if this is railroading for the story or just bad luck. Either way, it’s frustrating as you have no way to influence this.

In the second loop things are slightly different. Eugene is less negative, and seems calmer, and his prevailing traits seem less forceful. Which is also weird, as he just takes it all in stride, and doesn’t really react to it. There’s no reason it wouldn’t exacerbate his negative emotions, but it doesn’t. When he sleeps at the end of a loop, he can review events, and then spend a point of Willpower to motivate himself or wrap up a mystery. It’s a weird system that I need to see working more to fully understand it, and the preview is just too limited. It’s also very slow, with long pauses between blocks of text that will need to be much snappier at launch.

But there’s a lot to like here, regardless. The art style is gorgeous, and Eugene seems fairly likeable with his little quirks. The various characters you meet will obviously have a part to play, and the phone call Eugene gets hints at darker, paranormal goings on. It’s unlikely to be a cheerful story, but there’s enough intrigue with the mysterious driver and Eugene’s past to just about create a hook. At present Rue Valley deals quite heavy-handedly with the concepts of emotions and id, but it’s early days and the preview is such a tiny slice of the game that, at the very least, it’s refreshingly impossible to predict.

Rue Valley is coming soon to PC via Steam.