I’ll Do Anything For Love
HIGH Beautiful pixel art
LOW The point-and-click section
WTF The livestream section
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi everyone! Eugene Sax here with another review from Gamecritics.com.
It was a normal evening for Maya, sitting down to a dinner she didn’t like with her family. Then the phone rings, and she answers it — but no one is on the other line when she picks up. When Maya returns to dinner, everyone is gone, and the door is left open. Walking outside, Maya finds herself in a lonely castle with no one else around and the ruins of her house behind her. Despite how unexpected and unsettling this is, she has nothing else to do but move forward and try to find some answers.
Love Eternal is a precision platformer where players control Maya as she tries to escape the castle she finds herself in. Players will run, jump, and reverse gravity to navigate spike pits, lasers, and escape the occasional monster chasing them. As they explore, they’ll start to uncover the truth of why Maya is there and why this castle was created in the first place.
Love Eternal may have a reasonably short story, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy to get through though, as this is one of the most punishing platformers I’ve played in a long while. Players will be on a knife’s edge making sure they hit each jump and change gravity at the perfect moment in order to progress safely through the world. When players flip gravity, they can’t flip it again until they hit solid ground or run into a red crystal. Of course, this means that if players change gravity at the wrong time, don’t jump far enough, don’t time movement exactly right, death is inevitable. It requires skill and precision — some screens I could get through in one or two tries, while others took me hundreds of attempts before I succeeded.
For better or worse, a big part of the platforming is momentum for Maya. Another thing to consider when players flip gravity is that they don’t instantly start moving in the other direction. There’s a floaty nature to the flip, and players will arc in the air a bit before moving in the other direction. It does make the movement feel unique, but it also makes it more painful than it probably needs to be. I often felt like I would try to change gravity in the same exact spot multiple times, only for the arc of the character to be different enough to cause me to fail in a new way.
While I was ready for a platforming challenge when I started Love Eternal, what I wasn’t expecting was the atmosphere and narrative it attempts to bring to the table.
What intrigued me initially was the infusion of horror. Every so often, the platforming is broken up by small vignettes that tell Love Eternal‘s story, each one increasing the feeling of dread as the game moves forward. The focus of these scenes isn’t on jump scares or constant threat of an enemy, but something more quiet and subdued.
Love Eternal plays with the timeline as far as revealing the story to players, but I felt that the whiplash of intense platforming clashed with the far subtler narrative moments, and honestly, the script feels a bit too abstract for it’s own good. Strangely, the developers pivot to a long sequence of point-and-click style adventure in the second act — I’m guessing it was probably to help players slow down and focus on the story for that specific section, but I’m not sure it was a great choice when put into context with the rest of the content.
Love Eternal is very demanding game — it demands perfection for its platforming, focus for the narrative beats, and patience for both. I can say that it’s one of the most unique games I’ve played in a very long while, and maybe with time I’ll come to enjoy it more than I did. I never stopped being intrigued enough to keep pressing on, but the frustration it put me through only took away from the experience overall.
For me, Love Eternal gets 6.5 rage inducing deaths out of 10.
Disclosures: This game is developed by brlka and published by Ysbryd Games. It is currently available on PC, Switch, PS4/5, Xbox One X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 4 hours of play were spent playing the game, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Mild Violence. Maya will die to spikes and getting crushed by bounders, but explodes into white particles. There is a part where the player will kick a character’s arm until it falls off, but there is no blood.
Colorblind Modes:Â There are no colorblind modes.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is text in-game, but the text is not resizable. Audio is not needed for gameplay. The game is fully accessible.
Controls: Controls are fully remappable.
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