Part RPG, part adventure game, Rue Valley is a story that meditates on the inherent repetition of all gaming. Beyond titles in which replaying is the point – roguelikes such as Hades 2, or arcade games like Lumines Arise – most every game is about retrying in one way or another. Anyone who's lost all their lives in Super Mario Bros, or had to re-listen to the same barks after failing a firefight in a tomb in Uncharted can attest to that.
Rue Valley, from developer Emotion Spark Studio, is all about repetition, and trying again – but every loop is a part of the plot, shared by player character Eugene Harrow as well as simply you, the player. As his mandated therapy session draws to a close – which, for some reason, is in a motel room in the middle of nowhere – he ends up trapped in a time loop from 8:00pm to 8:47pm. Why? And what to do about it? Both you and Eugene need to figure that out, one loop at a time.
