GAME CLEAR No. 317 -- Love Eternal

Love Eternal (2026, Multiplatform)

Developer: brlka
Publisher: Ysbryd Games, PLAYISM
Clear Version: PS5
Clear Platform: PS5
Clear Date: 10/14/26

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Why should I care?
Gravity-flipping platformers are nothing new, but few have vibes quite like this.

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We play

We’re back with the second October game of 2026. Love Eternal is a little expectation-subverting indie psychological-horror platformer. The kind of thing you gotta be playing from time to time. Or at least I do. It’s great.

The game stars teenager Maya as she tries to escape a dreary, cavernous labyrinth known as Shelter. The controls are simple: you can run, jump, and flip gravity. You can only flip gravity once before touching the ground again, unless you collide with one of the many red crystals suspended in the air throughout the game’s challenging platforming screens. That’s all there is to it. Once things ramp up, I’d call it basically a momentum-based platformer. The vast majority of the challenge is in managing your jump arc as it relates to your current gravitational pull to slingshot your way through mazes of spikes. The feel of this is very tightly tuned — it’s like being on a knife’s edge at all times when it really gets going.

With generous checkpointing breaking up grueling platforming challenges, this game is very much in the Celeste and Super Meat Boy tradition of platformers. Like those games, my experience playing this game was that my frustration with my failure was always overcome by my burning desire to give each screen one more try.

It doesn’t hurt that the sights and sounds are so brilliantly chilling. Maya’s walk cycle is beautifully animated, and the pitter-patter of her feet echoes through the dank expanse of Shelter, with stark background art accompanying the action in each room. Red crystals burst loudly as you pass through them; save points emit a sound that reverberates hauntingly. All is underscored by a haunting ambient soundtrack.

It’s a disquieting vibe befitting the game’s narrative. It would take me multiple playthroughs for me to put together a theory I could be confident in about what exactly transpired in this game (fortunately, that is not the aim of this little post). The plot is filled with vagaries and frequent (or constant?) instances of unreliable narration and/or point-of-view. It can be difficult to follow on a first pass, but themes of loneliness, selfishness, the difficulty of human connection (and self-sabotage in that effort) abound. Its ambiguity pulled a lot out of me to muster my best possible interpretation of events. It’s necessarily more deeply colored by my biases as a result, but in any case, I enjoyed relating to and trying to understand the troubled people of Love Eternal.

I was prepared to criticize this game for running out of ideas with its basic platforming concepts, but it does a nice job of flipping things completely upside down right as the platforming starts to wear. I’ll stop short of saying how, but there is a fun pivot in here.

If you’re looking for a seasonal game to play but are short on time, Love Eternal demands about 3 hours thereof. It’s well worth it.