Love is one of the most complicated emotions we can experience, impacting every kind of relationship. Family, friends, significant others, and pets are all recipients of our love. Love can be a beautiful thing, but it can also become dark, taking something should be joyful and pure and turning it into something horrifying. Love Eternal is a precision platformer that explores the themes of love, obsession and loneliness, while exploring the darkest side of its nature.
Love Eternal is not a game that will appeal to everyone, but it will find fans who enjoy a tough challenge. You control Maya, a young teenager who finds herself in a strange castle realm created by a goddess who has suffered a terrible loss. This precision platformer tasks you with defying gravity in order to defy death, but you will undoubtedly die a few times. By which I mean a few hundred times.
The toughest areas contain spike walls, platforms and laser barriers. Touching any of these means instant death, and it is far from a simple thing to avoid hitting them. When you switch direction in midair, Maya’s momentum doesn’t just stop. Instead, there is some movement in the original direction before switching, so you need to time your switches perfectly. Frustration is borne out of knowing which path you need to take and seeing the solution, but if your reactions are not fast enough, failure will meet you many, many times until you finally put together the perfect run to get you through a room.
Love Eternal is not just a precision platformer, with its horror narrative taking the form of a text adventure, a choice which works surprisingly well with the horror element of the story. This is very much a psychological horror with things being off from the very beginning, but don’t expect it to be a story that is straightforward. You’re left questioning what is real and what is delusion, whether what you are perceiving is the truth or warped through your own views. There are completely weird moments that are never really explained, with the interpretation left for you to decipher.
The story and the narrative journey is what kept me pushing through Love Eternal despite getting frustrated with the platforming in some sections, retrying the same room over and over just so I could see the next story beat. At the end of it, I am left with questions on what I experienced, wondering if my interpretation is right. I won’t say what my thoughts are because Love Eternal should be experienced without spoilers, but this is the centrepiece to the game.
Love Eternal has a pixel art style which looks very good, but what really catches your eye is the artwork that makes up the backgrounds of the different rooms. These backgrounds are also parts of the story that you piece together as you learn what befell the goddess who created the dangerous castle. Then there are other scenes that are designed to elicit fear from you, especially in the text adventure sectinos. There’s that impending jumpscare sense of fear, along with uneasiness as you take in the scenes and notice things that are out of place.
The soundtrack is enjoyable too, but playing through on the Switch 2 there were moments where the sound cut out completely. To be honest, at first I thought it was a stylistic choice where all noise from a room would just disappear, giving a more oppressive undertone to the experience. The sound was working in the menu, and it was only after I restarted my console and the sound came back that I realised it was a bug. I don’t think I have experienced many bugs that actually feel like a natural part of a game in all my years of reviewing.
