Rue Valley

What do I say? It's wonky and it's not that "muh disco elysium was betta" (what are you on about guys, chill) Getting back to basic stuff: introduction is smeared, ui isn't there yet and I'm not given a single goal. Therefore I have no reason to come back -- there's nothing waiting for me other than the game that tries to be cool, but is not having the grip required to climb desired height.

I can't believe I played 15 hours of this nonsense. Rue Valley reminds me of old point-and-click adventure games by Sierra, where I always got stuck at some point, but luckily I didn't have those problems with Rue Valley because the things you need to do are almost always nicely tracked (except the first and last loop). The biggest similarity: PC-first controls. Gamepad? Forget about it; it's unusable and frustrating, but that seems to be a standard for such fake-3D isometric games, so stay strictly to keyboard and mouse. Example: walk next to a thing (tombstone) you want to interact with and then press the A button; your character walks to some other fixed location (in front of it) for that thing and then interacts with it, like it couldn't do that same action almost in the same position where they already were. Want to walk up the stairs? You have to interact with the stairs to trigger the stair-climbing animation from a specific fixed location again. That's fine for mouse clicking, but horrible for gamepad. Rue Valley started so strong; I liked the setting, and even the time-loop mechanics were pleasantly intriguing, but then everything suddenly fell apart. Initially, the gam…

A solid Discolike with some excellent writing let down by its rigidity in puzzle design. Well worth the price of admission.

POTENTIAL

I was hesitant to play this game because of the mixed reviews, but so glad I did. Rue Valley is a love letter to loss, feeling stuck, taking chances, and ultimately life itself. One bad review said that they were frustrated that they had to fumble through and nothing really changed. Dear player, I believe that was precisely the point. The developers wanted you to empathize with the protagonist by feeling his frustration firsthand. The resulting conclusion is one of deep humanity and what makes life worth living.

it is not so bad, but boring and I got stuck multiple times to understand what I need to do and and the end of the game found out that I missed one interation point which unlocks a different ending didnt want to replay it so watched walkthrough and was dissapointed even more