Mixing a creepy atmosphere with creepily precise platforming, Love Eternal feels bit different than other games. While it may echo the likes of Super Meat Boy in its gameplay, and physiological horror in its presentation, it still manages to feel pretty unique overall. It can test the patience a little too much at times and there are some aspects that didn’t win me over, but on the whole I still enjoyed my time with the game..
The bulk of the game has us manipulating gravity as Maya, a child stolen from her family by a jealous deity, lonely and selfish enough to ruin others lives to have them feel their pain. Levels are single screen in nature, and range from simply getting through a few platforms to performing the kind deft movements that’d win them a gold in the deity-defying olympics.
Pressing X sees Maya’s gravity flip, so the floor becomes a ceiling and vice versa. She can also jump, and flick switches, and while this moveset may seem slight, we can assure you that it won’t take long to realise there are still plenty of crafty ways to create a challenge.
Maya can only flip gravity once and must have her feet touch the floor before she can do so again. This allows a sense of normalcy to the gameplay as we know we’re limited to one move. When red crystals are introduced things get much, much harder, as these reset her ability in mid-air. One stage in particular requires at least half a dozen flips without touching the ground, all while navigating a maze of traps and spikes and bearing in mind the forward momentum that requires a split second longer to reverse the longer Maya is falling.
Love Eternal absolutely imbues the ‘one more go’ mindset of Meat Boy and its ilk, with super fast restarts and very tight controls that mean it rarely feels unfair when we fail. And fail we will. Some stages, such as the aforementioned one among others, require such precise movements that even a small nudge the wrong way is fatal. It’s all too easy to get stuck in the loop of jump/die/restart/jump/die/restart and so on. We are granted a save point before each level at least, but often this can only amplify the repeated tries. What is it that Vaas in Far Cry 3 says about the definition of insanity?
It says something for Love Eternal that we wanted to keep trying though, and conquering a challenge is a rewarding feeling indeed. We have found that some difficulty spikes can feel a bit off at times, where one really hard stage is surrounded by far easier ones, but on the whole the challenge has been enjoyable.
We have to say that the story didn’t especially grab us though. It’s certainly creepy, with some excellent use of the simplistic visuals to create some eerie sights and some effectively minimal audio, but we found ourselves just keen to get back to the puzzling and not really taking a lot of the tale in. Cutscenes and interludes are kept brief (save for one specific section that dragged on far too long), so it’s not long until we’re back into the loop of death once again, and for us that was perfectly fine indeed. It does at least try some interesting ideas with its themes and shake ups, but we were definitely more invested in the puzzles here.
Conclusion
While the narrative didn’t grab us, the brilliant presentation and moreish challenge did. It may make us curse more than a few times as we die yet again, but the challenge was ultimately enjoyable enough to want to continue on regardless.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
