Love Eternal Review: Precision Platforming Meets Psychological Horror
Love Eternal is an unsettling, claustrophobic, disheartening experience, and I loved it.
Love Eternal is the debut game from developer brlka and published by Ysbryd Games, who you may know from last year’s Everdeep Aurora and Demonschool.
This game combines two genres I never would have guessed would go together: precision platforming and psychological horror. It uses a minimalist pixel art style during gameplay and features various more detailed story scenes throughout the game.
Love Eternal, Developer: brlka
You play as a young girl, Maya, who is unknowingly trapped in a dark castle of memories by a lonely deity, and the only way out is to pass through ever-increasing challenges of your skills, reflexes, and precision. Your main ability is to flip gravity. You can only do this once before landing again, unless you crash through a floating red orb.
If you aren’t familiar, you may be wondering what makes a game a precision platformer. The name is a strong hint; it emphasizes precision above all else. Land a little bit off, jump a little too high, and you’ll have to try again. Other types of platformers tend to be more forgiving about the exact placement of your character in the world. There are elements of puzzles here, but where these kinds of games differ is that once you’ve figured out what you need to do, you still need to pull it off.
One of the best examples I can think of is Celeste, a highly regarded indie game from 2018.
But Love Eternal is similar only in its platforming challenges; it’s sort of like if Celeste were made by A24, in a world where A24 made video games.
To clarify: this game contains many horror elements and unsettling moments, but it is not violent or gory, nor does it rely on excessive jump scares. This is not a game for the faint of heart, but if you are worried about things like blood, you don’t have to worry here.
But it’s not just the horror elements that make me say this is not for the faint of heart.
Love Eternal, Developer: brlka
Love Eternal has some extraordinarily challenging levels.
To try to put it in perspective, when brlka and Ysbryd Games sent over a review code, they thoughtfully let me know that it was expected to take between 4 and 6 hours to complete the game.
It ended up taking me 10 ½ hours.
And roughly 5 or 6 of those hours can be accounted for by just three levels. One of the last levels in the game took me at least 3 hours alone.
When a game reaches this level of challenge, it does raise the question: why keep playing? Why spend 3 hours flipping around lasers and spikes?
Because it’s worth it.
When I was trying to think of what to compare this experience to, I thought of trick-shot videos: those guys on YouTube who set up ridiculous situations, like trying to bounce a ping-pong ball off half a dozen pots and pans from across the room to get it into a shot glass.
Love Eternal, Developer: brlka
They often spend hours just tossing ping-pong balls at the same spot, only for a few-second-long clip of it all working out in the end. But if you’ve seen the reactions those guys have when they finally accomplish the task, it’s an incredibly satisfying feeling. That is definitely how I felt when I finally beat those challenging levels. I would often stop, drop the controller, and shake my fists into the ceiling, finally letting out all my frustration in a primal yell.
But aside from that sense of accomplishment, I also found myself feeling sympathetic for the protagonist, Maya. If I gave up, she would be stuck in this maze of a castle for eternity. In many ways, it felt like we were in it together. I couldn’t just abandon Maya to her fate, so we both had to escape.
Love Eternal’s challenges can be brutal, but they are still doable. There will be moments where you think it’s impossible, but you can still do it. It might just take some time and a little luck.
I also want to take a moment to talk about Love Eternal’s visual style. Maybe the most interesting to me was the use of negative space. In the opening scenes of the game, you exist in a small rectangle at the center of the screen. Your bedroom, the hallway, and then the family dining room. It’s unusual for a game to leave so much space unused. This changes when the platforming starts, but the game repeatedly returns to this ominous, claustrophobic viewpoint and eventually uses that negative space to reveal more of the ongoing story and perhaps what was happening outside that small box all along.
Love Eternal, Developer: brlka
I would have loved this game simply for the platforming challenges, but Love Eternal also takes some big swings in its story. It’s not afraid to get weird and, near the end of the game, even shifts the experience to a first-person point-and-click for a little while, giving the player more insight into the overall narrative.
Love Eternal is an unsettling, spooky, and weird horror game with some of the most challenging platforming experiences I’ve encountered so far. If any of that sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend giving this a try.
This weird little game holds a special place in my heart because when I started this channel, FinallyGotAroundTo, one of the first events I attended was PAX West two years ago, where I played the game's demo for the first time and got hooked. I think between Love Eternal, Croak, and TetherGeist, that specific PAX might have been what got me hooked on precision platformers.
Love Eternal is available on February 19th on PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox One and Series X / S, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam and G.O.G.