Upcoming RPG Rue Valley is kinda like Deathloop meets Disco Elysium

GLHF got an in-depth look at Rue Valley, an upcoming RPG from new studio Emotion Spark that’s a lot like if Disco Elysium were a time-loop mystery

Emotion Spark/Owlcat

New studio Emotion Spark has big plans for Rue Valley, its debut game. On the surface, it’s about a broken man attending therapy at a motel in the middle of nowhere and the equally broken people he meets there. The setup – facing your inner demons and becoming a better person – might sound a little too familiar. After seeing Rue Valley during a recent preview and playing it a bit myself, though, it looks like Emotion Spark has something rather more interesting in store.

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The “Deathloop meets Disco Elysium” comparison is more than just a catchy headline. Rue Valley is the kind of CRPG where your character’s personality build determines what paths forward are open to them and where investigation and creative thinking uncover clues you need to understand what’s going on. It’s also a time-loop mystery, one that has you learn how to avoid mistakes or catastrophes that happen at specific times and use your newfound knowledge to unravel the enigmas that are the people around you.

Please be nice to your bartenders / Emotion Spark

Emotion Spark’s chief creative lead Marko Smiljanic tells me the team originally planned Rue Valley as a film, but decided a video game fit their storytelling goals instead.

“We played with the idea of exploring how the character feels in specific environments and then went further and decided ‘let’s not just do a simple puzzle game. Lets make it meaningful,’ Smiljanic says. “The whole game is more about how these characters feel and how they are stuck in their own personal, emotional loops, feeling like they’re stuck and can’t move forward.”

The biggest enigma of Rue Valley is the protagonist. Why he’s at a motel in the middle of nowhere for therapy is something Rue Valley holds back for a reason that, for now anyway, seems like a rather clever idea. Improving your stats in Rue Valley happens when the protagonist confronts repressed memories in his psyche – guilt his father instilled in him, for example. He’s not ready to face them at first, and figuring out what accomplishments might give him the necessary emotional courage adds a bit of guidance for what you should aim to do during each loop.

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It starts with a little character building. You get several emotion groups to choose from at the beginning of Rue Valley, such as emotional sensitivity or analytic thinking. These groups have two two additional traits you can choose between, such as being guilt-ridden or dramatic if you invest heavily in the emotional category or paranoid if you’re too calculating. The protagonist’s personality affects the choices he makes during conversations and what actions he can take while exploring the motel and surrounding area. For a while at the start, for instance, he’s completely lacking in motivation and can’t do anything that involves effort.

Not the best way to end the evening / Emotion Spark

Each loop lasts for 47 in-game minutes, and time only passes when you complete important actions, such as having an in-depth conversation or wasting time drawing stick figures on dirty windows. In the demo I saw, the protagonist lacked the emotional intelligence to get the motel receptionist’s attention and had to figure out ways to pass time – including drawing on the window – until she finally finished the call, and he ended up with sore legs as a result of standing for so long.

In the second loop, he became paranoid that his therapist was monitoring patients with a hidden camera, found a bottle of whisky in the doctor’s bathroom while looking for a camera, and became tipsy. How influential these stats end up being seems a little unclear at this point, though it looks as though they’ll open different paths during certain circumstances.

Once the clock ticks over to 8:47 p.m., the sky catches on fire, and our hero wakes up again in therapy the next day. He might not realize what’s going on, but you start connecting ideas and finding patterns. For example, a car crashes into a sign outside the motel at a specific point during the evening. Normally, the protagonist falls asleep after sunset and wakes up when the crash happens. You could find a way to keep him awake, though, and witness the crash – and the person responsible for it – or explore the grounds after dark.

Emotional breakthroughs happen in the unlikeliest of places / Emotion Spark

New experiences lead to new memories, which you can store in a mind graph to help unlock fresh paths in a new loop. Smiljanic says every player will have a different adventure based on their choices – unsurprising, given how many ways Rue Valley lets you approach a single situation – and that there’s no right way to play. You might spend an entire loop waiting for a specific instance to occur or use every minute to try finding new information and ways to proceed. Every approach is valid.

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Rue Valley doesn’t have a release date yet, but if you want to check it out for yourself, there’s a free open alpha playtest on Steam now.