Love Eternal takes the natural tension of playing through a precision platformer and surrounds it with psychological horror. Naturally, the demo begins in one of the scariest locations of all: the family dinner table. After nobody answers the phone that your parents nagged you to pick up, you return to find that your whole family has suddenly disappeared.
This creates an initial jolt of unsettlement, although this feeling quickly fades. You journey through a number of smooth, though admittedly basic, platforming challenges, all set in a massive temple. There’s a bit of environmental storytelling, but nowhere near the amount suggested in Love Eternal’s trailer. The biggest scare comes in at the very end of the demo, when the player character’s father transforms into some kind of terrifying spider hybrid. I was actually a bit disappointed when the demo ended there. Was this a setup for a boss fight? I would’ve loved to play it out! You could say that the demo left me wanting more, but really, I just wanted a better taste of what to expect from the game’s progression.
Love Eternal Offers Fluid Platforming, But Gets Weighed Down by Clunky Structure
Speaking of progression, Love Eternal’s save system stood out as the feature most in need of an overhaul. Players are expected to save by manually interacting with checkpoints, or else miss saving altogether. Manual save points typically exist to create tension, which is the reason you’ll see them in every difficult game this side of Dark Souls. This would-be tension is instantly evaporated in the Love Eternal demo, which features a checkpoint in nearly every room. It would be fine to give players such a crutch to fall back on, but why not just make saving automatic at that point? I won’t pretend to know a perfect solution, but I think a Shovel Knight-like compromise could do the trick. That is to say, you can keep the frequent checkpoints, so long as you offer a meaningful reward to players who decide not to use them.
Outside of that sticking point, gameplay is fluid and fun. Love Eternal makes use of a “flip” mechanic ripped straight out of a Celeste level. As much as I enjoyed the platforming, it left me with a definite hope that this won’t be the only mechanic introduced throughout the game’s runtime. There’s a similar case to be made about the game’s obstacles, which takes spike-dodging cues from Super Meat Boy. However, the demo (understandably) fails to show what variety of obstacles players may be able to expect throughout the game, if there are any.
The Verdict
In short, Love Eternal’s demo is a good use of half an hour, but it stops short of showing you anything you haven’t seen before. The game could use a bit more variety in the moment-to-moment gameplay, but it nearly makes up for this in the intrigue shown off by its horror elements. Love Eternal’s demo can be finely summarized in critique of those very horror elements: I like what I saw, but I would’ve liked to have been shown more in the first place.
