Celebrate Valentine’s With The Most Macabre Of Platformers
How far would you go to find your family? It’s a heavy question, and probably not one you want to answer right now. But Love Eternal is a heavy game. Would you travel through a platforming hellcastle, equal parts Clive Barker, The Ring and The Thing? I’d probably do it, but I’d be complaining about it for weeks afterwards.
Our main character in Love Eternal, Maya, was having a fine and grumpy dinner with her family when she’s abducted by a mad god. We’ve had family dinners where we’ve wished for the same, but this is far worse than expected. She oscillates between horrifying visions and Celeste-style punishing platforming, and there’s no safe haven in between.
Beauty In The Beastliness
Love Eternal is completely and utterly gorgeous. Which, in Love Eternal terms means it’s horrifying and fascinating in the same measures. The fluid pixel animations reminded me a little of Kentucky Route Zero, just with the slider moved from Twin Peaks to Hellraiser. I love so many moments in Love Eternal, and that’s often because of those animations: a spookily dancing sister is a particular highlight.
You’re tormented by scenes that could be your real family, tortures from the mad god, or twisted visions from your own mind. They are often slightly innocuous: little pixel glitches or did-you-see-that? hallucinations. Other times, you are less lucky. They’re hulking beasts or twisted creatures, and – if you’re like us – you might be scooting behind the sofa.
These visions were my favourite part of Love Eternal, as there’s real artistry and Giger-like imagination behind them. I almost wish they weren’t so ringfenced around the platforming, and bled into them a little more. It feels strange saying it, but I almost felt slightly too safe in the precise platforming sections. I would have welcomed some of the horror contaminating the gameplay.
Feeling The Gravity Rush
The platforming is very good, if faintly familiar and samey. Maya is small on the screen, which allows Love Eternal to fill the rest with traps and falls. That smallness also allows for a huge deal of precision. You have to squeak through tiny gaps and time jumps to perfection. It also makes you feel small in a god’s world, which only adds to the loneliness.
The killer app, at least initially, is an ability to flip gravity on a horizontal axis. That’s far from new, particularly in budget platformers which love the mechanic almost as much as a dash. But Love Eternal applies a tricksy Celeste lens to the gravity-flipping. It doesn’t just want you to learn it, it wants you to master it almost immediately.
So, what you get is some real through-the-eye-of-the-needle platforming. You’re not only flipping gravity at the right points, you’re manipulating velocity and arcing trajectories too. When is the right point to flip gravity, knowing that you will have some momentum from the first leap? At what point in gravity’s rainbow should you invert everything? You can feel like an experimental physicist in the opening exchanges.
The controls are excellent, so there’s never a sense that Love Eternal is getting in its own way. Far from it: all the errors are your own, and you’re soon learning how the very capable physics engine reacts to most of your maneuvers.
Death comes frequently. I wonder if there was a single screen that I didn’t die on, and I count myself as a reasonably mid game platform player. But while that might sound infuriating, Love Eternal almost always stops short of it. That’s because there are at least one or two checkpoints per game screen, so you will make progress, no matter how short the game session. There’s a beaming satisfaction of reaching a checkpoint that you haven’t reached for twenty or thirty deaths.
MIO: Murders in Orbit
The gravity mechanic is pushed as far as it can possibly go. Lasers, spikes, platforms of all types, gravity-flip stamina replenishers: they’re all utilised to make Love Eternal an exhaustive exploration of a single game idea. But if there’s a quibble, it’s that I wanted a little more breadth to the platforming. It’s far from one note, but it does explore the same general corner of the platforming world. I wouldn’t advise that you play Love Eternal soon after completing MIO: Memories in Orbit or Hollow Knight: Silksong, for example, as the platforming in those games does supersede Love Eternal.
What those two games don’t have, of course, is the ability to chill you to the bone (praise the mad gods: they both beat us up more than enough. We didn’t need psychological horrors too). It gives Love Eternal a particular flavour, like Dante approaching the Circles of Hell, only to find that it had been designed by Bowser. That’s not something you find everyday when booting up your Xbox, which is why I lean towards a low 4 rather than a high 3.5.
The Chill Of Precision Platforming
If precision platforming wasn’t chilling enough, Love Eternal coats it in thick, horrifying atmospherics. There’s nowhere to hide: the closest you will get to safety is the momentary haven of a checkpoint.
If that sounds like your cup of dark, dark coffee, then Love Eternal is very much the Valentine’s game of choice.
Important Links
Gravity-Bending Horror Platformer LOVE ETERNAL Is Out Now – https://www.thexboxhub.com/gravity-bending-horror-platformer-love-eternal-is-out-now/
Escape a Selfish God in Horror Platformer LOVE ETERNAL, Coming Late 2025 – https://www.thexboxhub.com/escape-a-selfish-god-in-horror-platformer-love-eternal-coming-late-2025/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/love-eternal/9nd8tbhtwk72
