Love Eternal on Steam is a strange beast of a video game. It’s as if indie masterpieces like Celeste or VVVVVV were made by A24 or Blumhouse. It’s an experimental precision platformer that features shades of horror and psychological elements to keep you on your toes.
In Love Eternal, you play as Maya, a young woman who is about to have dinner with her family when the phone rings. After answering the phone, her family disappears, and her world changes from mundane to Daedalian. Maya suddenly finds herself in a castle littered with rooms that will test her (and your) strength and patience.
Love Eternal is a precision platformer in which our protagonist jumps across spikes and laser beams while also flipping the direction of gravity. You are only able to manipulate gravity once unless you grab a red orb that gives you another charge. That’s the major gameplay loop of Love Eternal. You walk into a room, jump, and change gravity until you land in a safe spot; rinse and repeat.
What’s frustrating is that the difficulty seems to turn up the dial way too fast around the midpoint of the game. I spent an hour in one room that nearly made me rip out my hair. I just kept thinking to myself, “This wouldn’t be so bad if I had a dash or a second jump or something,” but I wasn’t so lucky. There aren’t any new traversal mechanics given to you throughout the game. In a way, I think that’s a pretty smart design choice because it forces the developer to stretch simplicity to its limits. However, in Love Eternal, it feels like something is missing. While the rooms do become more elaborate and interesting as the game progresses, Maya does not.
What makes Love Eternal so interesting to me is its experimental storytelling. The story is told through several vignettes that play at the start and end of each chapter. You follow Maya’s friends and family around as their bodies contort into these freaky fucked up noodle monsters that phase in and out of reality. It’s deeply unsettling, and it is the part of the game that has stayed with me the most. The more time you spend with these characters, the less comfortable you feel in the castle, and the more on edge you feel until the credits roll.
The game also changes up pretty dramatically by turning into a sort of visual novel. I actually feel like this style and presentation match the story more than the platforming does. It’s not that the platforming is bad; it just feels a little undercooked when set against the captivating, freaky narrative. I’d argue that it almost feels like there are two different games here, and not exactly in a way that I find super cohesive or necessary.
Love Eternal does an excellent job building tension and a sense of unease. While there are jump scares that absolutely got me, there are more instances of genuine terror. There is a moment right at the top of the game that got me so bad that I got up and walked out of my room. There are a few moments that are totally in your face, but I feel like the environment really creeped me out in a way that few games do. There are many sections where you are in your home, and these sections are segmented into a small rectangular space on the screen, whereas the rest of the screen is black negative space. Sometimes things happen in the negative space – in the “out-of-bounds” – and it is extremely effective in making you feel like no place is safe. The castle’s backgrounds appear huge, making Maya look like she’s in a castle built for people ten times her size. The sense of size and lack of NPCs heightens the sense of loneliness that Maya must be going through – it’s depressing.
While Love Eternal isn’t a unique or hyper-interesting platformer, it’s unique and interesting in every other way. It’s not that the gameplay itself is bad; it just doesn’t do much to set itself apart in a world full of indie titles that fill a similar niche. What makes Love Eternal stand on its own is the bizarre story and the way it intermingles with the gameplay. While I do feel like the platforming and delivery of the story are at odds, I feel like that was an intentional design choice that people will either love or hate. I found myself somewhere in between. I can see this game becoming something a bunch of YouTubers will make video essays about in the future. Overall, Love Eternal worked for me; it just didn’t blow my mind. If you’re into difficult platforming and eerie visuals that make you say “what the fuck,” then this is an easy get.
