Love Eternal is a story-rich 2D pixel art precision platformer featuring a human protagonist who’s dealing with real-world issues (albeit in a surrealist setting). This description probably brings Celeste (2018) to mind. After all, there aren’t too many games that combine challenging platforming with deep, serious storytelling. So, it might be useful to briefly set out how these two video game cousins diverge. The platforming mechanics and physics in Love Eternal are fresh, unique and inventive: the protagonist, Maya, does not move or feel like Celeste’s Madeline. Moreover, the storytelling modes and narrative structure are more abstract, symbolic and surreal than those employed in the latter, and the psychological horror is more overtly leaned into. In short, Love Eternal is an original-feeling precision platformer with arthouse horror sensibilities. It is very much its own thing.
However, it is first and foremost a challenging platformer, and games in this genre live or die on their movement mechanics and pinpoint controls. In both of these areas, it absolutely excels. The joyful movement in this nightmarish world is a dream. This is top-drawer precision platforming. Unsurprisingly, the solo developer (brlka, aka Toby Alden) behind the game is clearly a wonderfully geeky theorist on the minutiae of developing tight, responsive and highly kinetic platformers (as this talk suggests). This obsessive attention to detail comes through strongly in their game.
The main gravity-defying mechanic is reminiscent of indie classic VVVVVV (2010), only considerably more complex. In VVVVVV the jump itself reverses gravity, but in Love Eternal a separate ‘flip’ input is added to a basic jump (which itself is pleasingly sensitive to button pressure). The combination of jump and flip button inputs creates more nuance in the traversal possibilities on any given screen. It also enables you to spend a lot of time in the air, making you feel like a death-defying trapeze artist.
Like all the best precision platformers, Love Eternal presents players with two distinct challenges:
One – Plot your way across the screen, working out the exact inputs and movements you will need to successfully negotiate all the obstacles. In this sense, each screen is a puzzle to be solved. Once solved, you must then…
Two … Execute your plan! Your mind and hand must become as if one, and, on a good day, you might just find flow, the holy grail of the precision platforming aficionado.
Each screen in a successful precision platformer will thus ideally provide two eureka moments – two glorious hits of dopamine – as a reward for puzzling and platforming your way across them.
A few key design choices are needed to help make this happen. Firstly, good level design. Every screen of Love Eternal has clearly been meticulously laid out. Reading and parsing each part of them is a joy, like a meeting of minds between player and creator. Secondly, in order to help smooth out the execution part of one’s ingenious traversal plan, instant respawns on each screen are vital so as to avoid losing the sense of flow. You will, naturally, die a lot in Love Eternal, but the lightning-quick respawns mean you’re back in the game, taking on that mean screen you’re stuck on, almost immediately.
It is, as you’d expect, a pretty hard game, requiring highly precise inputs and very quick reflexes. However, the learning curve feels kind. And there’s also plenty of respite in the (mostly) compartmentalised story sections (more on these later). I certainly wouldn’t consider myself a hardcore player of the genre, and I only got seriously stuck on two screens. I don’t know how many attempts it took me to get across these fiendishly difficult segments. Let’s just say a lot. The game certainly demands patience, and you have to be okay with the repetition it requires to get your fingers and thumb doing what you need them to do. But thanks to those instant respawns and the joyful movement, I never got frustrated.
The sense and feel of the movement are sublime throughout. Flying through the air, connecting strings of miraculous jumps and flips together in graceful arcs around spikes (that classic enemy of the platforming fan), lasers and strategically placed blocks is so much fun. A tight grasp of the gravity mechanics, especially the fall speed of Maya – which is beautifully calibrated – is essential to achieve these kinds of manoeuvres. Maintaining air control is certainly tricky but feels so tactile. Intuitive even. Once again, this all contributes to the sense of flow you can achieve in the game. I often felt like a super cool speedrunner, though I am nothing of the sort.
The setting of precision platformers, which dictates the kind of obstacles you can expect to encounter, is another important element in a successful one. Love Eternal is set in a nightmarish, prison-like castle that Maya must escape. Without giving too much away, the castle is both a literal space and a surrealistic metaphor. Maya seems very small in this cavernous, threatening place where up and down are all mixed up, and nothing feels quite right. It’s a strange, echoey, lonesome place. The sense of uncanniness is heightened by the eerie sound design. Mario would not like it here (and Luigi certainly wouldn’t!): this isn’t Bowser’s Castle. There are no enemies, only inanimate obstacles blocking your path out. But a sinister presence looms.
And here we come to the story, more specifically the game’s modes of storytelling, its narrative structure and its main themes. The narrative of Love Eternal is probably best described as experimental in that it deviates from how one might expect a story to be told in a platformer. The game opens, quite conventionally, with an introductory story section (albeit a highly strange, ambiguous one), and there are some story beats inserted between platforming sections (as in Celeste). However, there are also discrete story sections, which upend genre expectations in terms of their manga-inspired visuals, storytelling and mode of player interaction.
These unforeseen narrative turns – unforeseen both in terms of form and content – certainly threw me at first. The game asks you to think and interact in new, unexpected ways, to execute a mental flip every bit as challenging as one of Maya’s gravity-defying ones. A new set of interpretive tools is required to read them. But if you’re willing to ride its surreal story waves, it turns out that this creepy experimental narrative turn is very much in the service of plot and character development – that is, of traditional storytelling.
The narrative structure also provides you with plenty of respite, thinking time away from the intense challenge of the platforming, in which to reflect on the themes and symbolism at work in the game. In short, it helps the player-reader process the narrative material. Of course, not everyone will like these aesthetic choices. It’s a brave and risky move, playing around with genre expectations in this way. And it asks for a little bit of patience from its players. It certainly did feel jarring at first. And it does (intentionally) break the narrative flow of the game. However, after my initial surprise, I found it to be an innovative and revelatory flip of one’s genre-specific storytelling expectations.
These formal shifts also help support the depiction of the game’s main themes, freeing it up to use a whole new set of storytelling techniques to portray its characters’ painfully deep loneliness, crippling lack of self-knowledge, and burning intense need for constant affirmation – for love eternal! Such extreme emotions, in a sense, both justify and generate the need for the kinds of surreal symbolism the game deploys to delineate them. There’s nothing stranger, or more uncanny, than human emotions. Realism sometimes might not be capacious enough to contain them. In this sense, form creates meaning in Love Eternal, helping it to portray cosmically intense levels of emotion.
