Rue Valley review – time is a flat circle

A new time travel game influenced by the classic Disco Elysium gives you just 47 minutes to escape from Groundhog Day.

There’s something alluring about video games structured around time loops. Games usually involve a degree of repetition and making incremental progress, while getting to know a place’s geography and events by visiting them over and over again, proves to be a solid foundation. Zelda: Majora’s Mask was a brilliant, if now slightly old school, example and while the more recent Deathloop was completely different in its world and approach, it made inspiring use of similar temporal circularity.

Rue Valley is the latest addition to the genre and although its time loop isn’t quite as tight as the one you’ll find in the candidly named Twelve Minutes, the 47 minutes you spend in its tiny slice of America are nonetheless highly focused. You play as a man named Eugene Harrow, starting each run in the office of Dr Finck, a psychiatrist who you don’t want to be speaking to, but have been court mandated to visit.

Looking like an isometrically viewed comic book, with conversations and Eugene’s internal monologue appearing down the left side of the screen, fans of Disco Elysium will immediately recognise the similarities. That includes the fact that it’s basically a text adventure, has no combat, and delivers a similarly impressionistic and slightly oblique set of interesting and peculiar characters. It also shares Disco Elysium’s unfortunate habit of not feeling all that bothered about resolving its many plot strands, but more on that later.

Starting by choosing Eugene’s personality, you can set him up to be anything from recklessly impulsive to indecisive. Socially, you can position him from awkward to arrogant to nosy, and his emotional attitude can range between dramatic at one extreme to cynical at the other. We assumed nosy wouldn’t be too bad for investigating a mystery, but it’s impossible to avoid other traits that seem more likely to get in the way.

You soon discover that those qualities fluctuate with his moods and status effects, the latter of which can be anything from thirsty or tipsy, to ‘total lack of motivation’, which is how our Eugene started the game. These affect the actions and dialogue that are available to you, the game clearly labelling the options opened up or shutdown by current traits.

Fortunately for your sanity, memory persists between 47-minute runs, so anything you find out while you’re feeling arrogant, is still available at times when Eugene’s more introverted.

Your progress, either through conversation or observation, is noted in a gradually expanding mind-map, charting your investigation. When you spot something new it appears as an idea node. You can spend an inspiration point – earned by making breakthroughs – to commit to an idea, making it a firm intention. At that point it becomes a fully-fledged quest, unlocking related dialogue and actions.

You can also unearth old memories, roused by the events you overhear or wheedle out of the people you meet. You’ll need inspiration points to unlock those too, and sometimes quite a few. How you decide to allocate those points can have quite an influence on the paths that are open to you at any given moment. You’ll also find some activities are time dependent, forcing you to go back through the loop to return to them.

That means wasting time, which you can usually do via your (or rather Eugene’s) mobile, by doom scrolling or playing a hypercasual game. While that technique doesn’t always work, most of the time the game lets you select an end point for your distraction, for example the appearance of a particular character or the end of the loop, letting you skip directly to that moment. Otherwise, time remains frozen on an exact minute until you trigger an action that advances the clock.

Frustratingly, the structure is highly rigid, so just because you’ve unravelled a particular clue long before Eugene has figured it out, you can’t act on it until you’ve been through the exact sequence of events and conversational branches that lead to his version of the same epiphany. Sometimes that never comes, if he fails a die roll or just gets unlucky, and you can find entire avenues of inquiry permanently closed to you.

Other elements feel underdeveloped. The status effects, while a good idea, rarely seem to make much difference. Getting tipsy at the Kuiper Belt, the game’s local bar, temporarily adds a point of extraversion, but there was never anything we did at the bar that relied on that stat, rendering the effect moot.

The game’s interface is also somewhat rough around the edges, with interactions tending to be pernickety to trigger, a feature that remained a mild irritant throughout. Worse is the discovery that even though you can complete the story by finding your way out of the time loop, almost none of its subplots or character relationships seem to go anywhere at all.

There may well be other, more satisfying, resolutions to the game, but in our playthrough, despite escaping from the loop, we didn’t find out what caused it or what became of many of the promisingly offbeat folk we stumbled across. It felt as though they’d been imbued with feelings and direction, only to be abandoned. We’re all for a good red herring, but when so many revelations go nowhere, it risks making the whole endeavour feel pointless.

In spite of appearances, Rue Valley doesn’t have Disco Elysium’s eccentricity or depth, and while its setting, characters, and mind-map structure present a promising milieux to explore, it’s really not worth your time.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £24.99
Publisher: Owlcat Games
Developer: Emotion Spark
Release Date: 11th November 2025
Age Rating: 12

Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.

MORE: PS5 console price cut by over £130 in Black Friday 2025 UK deals

MORE: Young gamers only want the most boring video game Christmas presents

MORE: Xbox console price rise coming ‘very soon’ due to Microsoft error claims insider

Comments Add as preferred source