Love Eternal Review: A Psychological-Horror Platformer that Sticks with You

3 weeks ago 17

Published Feb 18, 2026, 11:00 AM EST

Ethan Krieger (He/Him) is an editor at DualShockers that got started in the writing industry by covering professional basketball for a sports network. Despite being a diehard sports fan (mainly formula one, basketball, American football, and golf), video games have always been his #1 interest.

I'm all about weird, shocking moments in video games. Titles like Doki Doki Literature Club and The Stanley Parable alike are experiences that stick with players long after credits roll, because there's an immediate understanding that what you just witnessed was a one-of-a-kind-type of video game.

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Love Eternal, the forthcoming psychological-horror platformer, falls into this same category. Take a look at the game's trailer and it becomes immediately apparent that this could be a particularly memorable one. Or maybe don't watch the trailer, because if you know this type of video game, you also probably understand that going in as blindly as possible to one of these is usually the move. For Love Eternal, that's definitely the case.

As one of the resident platformer lovers on staff, as well as someone that gravitates toward anything that I can consider weird or that massively subverts my expectations in a positive way, Love Eternal seemed like a no-brainer to dive into. It's a brisk 3-4 hour journey, but one that I'm glad I embarked upon, despite feeling like my brain was a bit broken by the end.

Let's get into everything that this trippy little platformer has to offer.

Conquering a Creepy Castle

Love Eternal kicks into gear within a matter of minutes, after main character Maya makes her way to the dinner table with her family, steps away to answer the phone, then returns to the dining room to find everyone missing. After venturing outside to investigate, we see that she's been transported to some sort of alternate dimension and is now roaming the rooms of a derelict castle.

From a story perspective, that's really about as far as we'll go here. There's more information to be found by even just going to the game's Steam page, but again, you don't truly want to know what's really going on in Love Eternal if you can help it. Let's just say that the castle belongs to someone you'll want to avoid as Maya, but doing so is much easier said than done.

The mystery of the castle doesn't take long to reveal (again, the game is only a few hours), but each new story beat and creepy moment as you start to figure out what's happened to your family and what's brought you to this creepy castle in the first place are all genuine highlights of Love Eternal. I never quite knew what was going to happen next, and the horror of the unfolding narrative became my favorite part of this game overall.

In fact, as much as I did (mostly) enjoy the platforming, by the end, I'd noticed that I was just getting through the gameplay sections simply so that I could see what was going to happen next in the story. I don't mean this too negatively about the platforming/moment-to-moment experience of Love Eternal itself. It's mostly just that the psychological-horror aspect of it all really did have me that invested.

I never quite knew what was going to happen next, and the horror of the unfolding narrative became my favorite part of this game overall.

From a presentation perspective, the hand-drawn pixel art is simple, but looks consistently amazing. Every frame of both Maya's home and the mysterious castle look equal parts lovely, uncanny, and dreary alike, and it works way more often than it doesn't. My only gripe is that, stylistically, the castle did look bland by the end, mostly because I was expecting some more biome variation. There's occasional rain and small color changes, but it's mostly just you navigating the maze-like structure of a cold, old, stone building.

The soundtrack is an additional standout, filled with subtle, ambient, haunting, perfectly crafted soundscapes to match the unsettling tone of the action on screen. It's also a case study of how removing all sound/music from a game in an instant can serve to send a proper chill down a player's spine.

Something else to touch upon with Love Eternal is how meta/fourth-wall-breaking it can be at times. As is the theme of this review, I would be doing you a disservice if I revealed too much. Suffice to say, there are many more moments than you'd expect in such a short experience where you'll simply be shocked by what's taking place on screen, as it is nearly constantly trying to trick you into a sense of not being able to tell apart the different realities within the game itself.

Classic Games That Can Read Your Game Files

As an extra surprise, there's also a nice level of well-placed humor throughout that's never expected, but is laugh-out-loud funny while still somehow weaving itself into the horror of what's all ultimately at play too. At one point, a character is presenting a PowerPoint, complete with reading aloud the stock prompts of "Click to add title. Click to add text." It's hilarious, but is also telling you very important information about the speaker as well, ultimately serving the narrative perfectly and creepily.

You'll learn how to properly read manga, because why not? You'll notice characters glitching and shifting around out of nowhere, sometimes breaking the confines of the screen without rhyme or reason. It all builds together to create such a uniquely eerie and creative psychological-horror experience that's pretty rare in the 2D platforming genre.

Dialogue is consistently sharp, well-written, perfectly uncanny and concerning, and once again, serves the tone of the game tremendously. There are only a handful of speaking parts in the game, but it feels like no opportunity is missed to make the most out of every word that's ever placed on the screen.

It all builds together to create such a uniquely eerie and creative psychological-horror experience that is pretty rare in the 2D platforming genre.

Halfway through, Love Eternal will also fundamentally change into a completely different type of video game for an extended period of time. Truly, this game is actually only half platformer. The rest will be up to you to uncover, but just know that the switch-up is brilliant, and something I'll be thinking about for a long time.

All of this culminates with an ending sequence that is so aggressively meta that I really felt like my brain was broken for a good hour or so after credits rolled. Please, just play this game and then hit me up on Twitter so we can talk about it. Not since Doki Doki Literature Club has something turned my brain into scrambled eggs quite like the last 25% of Love Eternal.

We've Got Momentum, Baby

Everything we've mentioned so far paints this game as a truly special experience, and it honestly is. Where Love Eternal unfortunately, tragically stumbles a bit is in the platforming itself. There's still a lot to like here, however, so let's start with the positives.

Not since Doki Doki Literature Club has something turned my brain into scrambled eggs quite like the last 25% of Love Eternal.

Love Eternal's mechanics are dead simple, and I actually love it for that. You have a jump (which is weighted perfectly), and you have a gravity flip ability, which allows you to swap between being attracted to either the floor or the ceiling. You can only swap gravity once per jump, unless you make contact with a floating, red orb in the air, which immediately replenishes your swap ability.

As you'd expect, this red orb then becomes the crux of the game's movement. You'll float through the air for ridiculous amounts of time, swapping gravity back and forth upwards of a dozen times before landing again thanks to this replenish mechanic. It makes for some truly challenging sections of gameplay, and when it works, it's a blast.

The main issue is that the gravity swap mechanic never feels truly precise, which is a big problem when it's kind of what all of the high-level platforming is mainly themed around. Momentum comes into play, so when you swap gravity, you don't just immediately start falling in the other direction. Instead, depending on your current velocity, your momentum will carry you further than you're likely expecting/planning on before sending you back in the other direction.

This idea is fine on paper, but with how precise Love Eternal expects you to be by about the midway point, it actually just results in way more frustration and a feeling of dying for reasons outside your control that you typically want to avoid in games like these. You'll think you're used to the momentum, and then you'll die 50+ times in a single room because you just can't anticipate it correctly anymore. It's simply too yo-yo-like, for lack of a better term.

Where Love Eternal unfortunately, tragically stumbles a bit is in the game's platforming itself.

I am totally fine with difficult platformers. In fact, I often seek them out. Ultimately, however, they need to feel fair, and like failure is your fault, not the game's/mechanics'. Love Eternal falls into the unfortunate latter bit too often, resulting in platforming that's more frustrating than it needs to be. There's a scribble in my notebook that reads "ULCER" in all caps, which I jotted down as the game's final, singular room kicked my butt for a solid thirty minutes.

It's a shame, because everything else about it is great. Love Eternal is a series of single-room challenges that you'll try over and over before finally completing and moving on, kind of like a Celeste or Super Meat Boy. I love these types of games and thoroughly enjoy solving the puzzle of where to land, how to avoid hazards, which switches to flip and then executing it all to perfection.

Love Eternal just doesn't always let me feel like I'm in total control of my destiny. I still had that rewarding feeling when I'd complete a particularly challenging section, but it also came with a lot of heartburn in the process too.

Light in the Darkness

As previously mentioned, Love Eternal took about 4-or-so hours for me. For some, this will be longer or shorter, as it really is going to come down to how quickly you can adapt to the momentum of the platforming in each new challenge room. Regardless, I can't help but feel that when you factor out the frustration points of the game and dozens, if not hundreds of deaths that didn't feel super fair, Love Eternal is downright brief.

On a personal level, I am 100% fine with short games, as long as the pacing is tight and what's presented to you makes the most of the runtime. In Love Eternal, it's half-and-half. What's here in terms of story, reveals, scares, tone, vibe, and presentation are all genuinely top tier. It's just that when you remove what ultimately feels like padding from retrying rooms over and over, there's just not a lot.

There also aren't any secrets to discover or ways to explore the castle whatsoever. There are no hidden rooms or challenges to strive for off the beaten path. It really is just a pretty linear collection of rooms in terms of the platforming sections, and while I did really have fun with most of them overall despite my movement gripes, it just doesn't feel like a lot of variety when compared against the short runtime.

At the end of the day, however, if you're okay with a brief but memorable experience, don't let the length of the title turn you away. I'm a firm believer in the type of game that can be beaten in one sitting, and that's how I played Love Eternal. I'd recommend you do the same. The story and horror of it all simply works better when you're ingesting everything at once, and the reveals/surprises also hit harder this way as well.

Love Eternal is awesome. It's unique, creative, haunting, unsettling, oppressive, and shocking in some amazingly cool ways. If you're like me, not every aspect of the gameplay itself will resonate. Yes, this is kind of a bummer, but I still find myself thinking about this one all the time since I completed it regardless.

Love Eternal delivers on the promise of a psychological-horror platformer in most ways. Its setting and presentation create a world where you're never quite sure what reality you're in, and a big mechanical switch-up halfway through is a wonderful, creative surprise that I'll be thinking about for a long time. The game gets more meta in ways than I could've predicted, and left my own brain scrambled entirely by the end of the short four-hour experience. As a platformer, it's easy to understand, though the unpredictable momentum of movement unfortunately keeps it from feeling as precise as genre enthusiasts will surely prefer. Still, it's one of those "play in one sitting" type of games that you won't want to miss if anything about the premise speaks to you.