Wander a castle built of bitter memories in LOVE ETERNAL, a psychological horror platformer with devious trials and an unsettling, experimental narrative. Find a way out – or live in Shelter forever more.
Developed by: brlka
Played on: Steam
Length: 4 hours
A review key was provided by Ysbryd Games.
Horror precision platformer are three words you rarely find stacked next to each other, but in the case of LOVE ETERNAL, you’ll find that it means two things. A horror game that also happens to be a precision platformer, but also a precision platformer that is a horror to play (in the best way possible).
You play as Maya, a child who thought she was sitting down for dinner with her family, only to be displaced from her home and imprisoned in a stone castle filled with spikes and lasers that spell instant death. The only tool in your arsenal is the ability to reverse gravity, and hopefully, a steadfast mental state.
Because you see, LOVE ETERNAL, for all intents and purposes, is a simple game. You can run, jump, interact with certain items, and you can reverse gravity. Then the game begins to add fuel to the embers. You learn that you can’t flip gravity again until you touch a surface, and you spend a couple of tutorial levels learning how to do that. Then the game introduces red crystals, which resets your ability and allows you to flip gravity again. A little challenging, but nothing you can’t handle.
Then you finish the tutorial, and suddenly, the once sizzling embers are now a roaring flame. What lies ahead are hundreds of uniquely designed torture chambers, many of which you will spend hours, if not days, trying to beat before the game beats you. I’m talking waking dreams about levels that become seared into your mind, twitching fingers from trying to hit that perfectly angled jump too many times.
See, I said LOVE ETERNAL was simple. I never said it was easy.
Much about LOVE ETERNAL should make it a ragebait game, but I found large chunks of my experience strangely meditative. Developer brlka manages to curate an echoing soundscape and moody ambience that makes failure feel almost hypnotic. As I kept sending Maya to her death again and again, I found myself lost in the motions after awhile. My mind wandered to other things as my fingers busied themselves, and even when I had beaten the level, I found that I couldn’t remember when I started it.
It helps that the game contains some of the most responsive and tactile controls I’ve felt in a platformer in a long time. Even suffering feels a lot less painful when accompanied with perfectly tuned controls and crisp in-game sound effects, so do yourself a favour and play this game on a good controller with headphones plugged in. It will also make the jumpscares hit harder, although that’s a pro or a con depending on who you ask.
The experience is tied together by the game’s narrative, which gets drip-fed to you in unsettling bits and pieces. Its minimalistic art direction works wonders to emphasise the uncanny and the macabre, and each little pocket of story feels like a reward after surviving several levels of purgatory. However, it also isn’t the most straightforward story and leaves most of it up to the player’s interpretation, which isn’t uncommon for stories like these.
That said, it’s a shame that the biggest hurdle between you and unlocking all the story is your skill limit. LOVE ETERNAL is not going to be for everyone, especially with the sharp difficulty spike immediately after the tutorial ends. Even compared to other precision platformers like Celeste, this game demands an inordinate amount of precision from its players. The game has no accessibility features, no life system, and not even a skip function for its harder levels.
The only life jacket the game throws your way is its save points, which are frequent enough to be merciful, but not frequent enough to make the levels easy. Still, there is no greater relief than landing on a save point after trying to beat a level for one hour straight. Whether that delayed gratification is enough for you to give LOVE ETERNAL a try, perhaps the demo will help you make up your mind.
Verdict: Welcome To Purgatory
Horror precision platformer are three words you rarely find stacked next to each other, but LOVE ETERNAL presents a blend of perfectly tuned controls and uncanny storytelling that is well worth your time. While the sharp difficulty spike is likely to turn off most players to this game, those who persist through this platforming purgatory are in for a unique experience.
