Rue Valley

I need to talk about this. How on earth has this got "Mixed" reviews? The game is amazing, the storytelling is beautiful and the art/music/voices are all top notch. If you enjoy story-focussed dialogue-heavy games, with intriguing mysteries and some light roleplaying moments, this game is amazing. It is very Twilight Zone in it's story and mystery, and throws a couple of twists and even a [spoiler] false ending [/spoiler]. The story was fairly linear in my one playthrough (17+ hours), with some unskippable parts, but there are side activities and the roleplaying is how you interact with the story. You cannot change or upgrade your "base stats" in a meaningful way once you start, but I found that to be just another addition to the storytelling, about being stuck, having regrets, etc. Now, in an almost ironic way, 17+ hours is too long for me to replay the game and check if there are alternative endings or routes or what the other personality traits would do: I've finished the loop and have no intention of diving into it again, but maybe in a few years I'd like to revisit Rue Valley. I do have to admit, I felt like some of the marketing for this did push this as a Disco Elysium type game, which may have messed with people's expectations of it, but this is it's own game, sharing some of the methods of storytelling but not meant to Disco Elysium 2. I also see many of these reviews completed at less than half of the playtime, which may just be skipping all of the story, text and dialogue, which would miss out on so much the game has to offer! The game is not pretentious in any way that I noticed, but I find people will say that about any media with any kind of metaphor in it's storytelling, almost like "if the metaphor is obvious to me, then it is pretentious" which is just not true. Last note, a mouse is preferable to controller. It works fine with a controller but it's just a more streamlined experience with a cursor (if they add a "cursor mode" for controller, that'd be perfect)