Hey, so, imagine you’re playingCeleste, and then your father turns into a giant spider at the dinner table and asks you why you don’t appreciate your mother’s cooking. That’sLove Eternal. Playing through the first level atGamescom, I was first struck by its gameplay, which uses gravity-based platforming to pretty good effect. It seemed like the kind of game I might have fun with, probably recommend to platforming fans but maybe not even finish myself. Then things started getting weird, and I was hooked.
You start Love Eternal in your bedroom, and go downstairs for dinner. You start to eat something fairly unintelligible in this pixel art aesthetic, and the phone starts to ring. It keeps ringing. Eventually, you’re told to answer it - immediately, there is a picture of an unhappy family masquerading as a happy one. So you get up, answer the phone, and take control.
Here, you’ve got a series of Celeste-style platforming challenges. You need to jump to platforms to clear gaps, and while each leap is tricky enough to warrant a few retries, checkpoints are plentiful. It’s not the ‘every screen a save’ system of Celeste, since you’ll find multiple checkpoints on a single screen, but it’s the same basic trade-off. The game will be hard, but we will let you try over and over again from exactly where you died.
In Celeste, passing through charms floating in the air gave you another jump, which was crucial in mastering the trickiest gaps. In Love Eternal, similar charms exist but you also have the ability to flip gravity on its head to pass through various spiked traps. These charms don’t offer a second jump - this only comes after touching down - but do allow you to flip or reflip gravity as you wish. You need to flow like water through the challenges Love Eternal offers, rather than the breakneck pace of Celeste with more of a rough and tumble reliance on timing your leaps and powering your way beyond obstacles.
At Gamescom, when you’re playing a dozen games a day, it’s a very hectic environment. I had forgotten all about the mysterious phone call and was focussed on getting through the relatively tricky challenges in Love Eternal’s demo in my 30 minute slot so that I’d have enough to write about when I got back. As I made my way into one screen, I saw my own character model flash up in a different place, and thought it was just a bug - to be expected with the pre-launch demos on a convention floor.
Then I made it past the next puzzle and saw my character model again, this time darting through a door. A few gravity flips later and I arrived at said door, where passing through it immediately transported me back to the empty room in my home that had nothing but a phone in it. The smash cut so sharply while playing prompted me to take a look around. This was a room with no furniture besides the coffee table the phone rested on. It had no purpose but to house a single telephone. In this new light, it was unnerving.
I hung the phone up, with no idea what the reason for my transportation (and subsequent return) was. Love Eternal is not a game that indulges in exposition and narrative handholding. So I head back to the dining room and find it empty. As I sit, my father’s head appears, floating with a ghostly wobble and an enraged expression painted across his thin face. Spider legs and thorax appear behind him, fading into view, and he scuttles forward towards me and grabs me with those furry pedipalps and pulls me close. Why, he demands to know, must I be so difficult? Why can’t I just sit with the family for a nice meal? Don’t I know how hard my mother has worked on this?! The screen fades to black, and my time with Love Eternal is over, but it will live long in the memory.
This mesh between gameplay and narrative is what I’m fascinated to see more of in Love Eternal. In the full trailer, there are NPCs, statues, and storylines in the puzzle world, but everything I experienced was eerily empty. There was a haunting feeling to Love Eternal, and while that may clash with the game itself at times - it’s tough to be immersed in the oppressive wonder of your own fear when you’re fully focused on a platforming challenge you’ve failed ten times in a row - there is something uniquely compelling to Love Eternal’s refusal to act like a traditional platformer. You might come for the gameplay, but you’ll stay for the existential dread.
