PAX West 2025: Love Eternal's understated horror and old-school flash platforming vibes - Hands-on preview
- Nate Hermanson
- Sep 26
- 5 min read
When I was younger, I was a fiend for any free games I could get my hands on. Flash games, free shareware, fangames, anything. Platformers were a constant among them, and I fell in love with the likes of Super Meat Boy, Knytt, VVVVVV, and An Untitled Story (a game I was obsessed with in 2007 and which I only learned a few years ago was made by Celeste's Maddy Thorson).
Love Eternal, a horror hardcore platformer, brought all those classics to mind, and apparently for good reason. Chatting with Ysbryd's Kyle Voong showed us that games like those were exactly the kind of thing that fueled brlka's debut release.
When we sat down in Ysbryd's tucked-away press room at their PAX West booth to check out Love Eternal, Voong hit us immediately with quite the hook.
"For Love Eternal," Voong remarks with a proud smile, "my elevator pitch is always: Ari Aster directs a precision platformer. There's a lot of fear in not knowing. There's this pervasive theme of isolation all throughout. I risk spoiling anything if I say too much; it's one of the games I think people have the best experience with if they go in knowing only a little drip about, if that."
A message like that would usually dissuade me from saying too much myself, because I love preserving the mystery of a project that thrives on it. But even after the 20 minutes I spent hands-on with the platformer, I'm not sure how much I can even extrapolate from what I played. The mystery is still firmly intact. Love Eternal is mysterious, it's eerie — and it's clear that there is so much more waiting when the game releases.
The demo opens with Maya, a young girl with striking white hair, waking up in her bedroom and being called down for a family meal in the kitchen. We walk calmly through narrow halls and join the other family members, and already you feel an edge of tension. Family dinners take on a different tone for everyone, and if you know what it's like to sit down for one where you're just waiting for the room to explode, Love Eternal's opening scene is familiar.
"One motif of Love Eternal is the nature and relationship of family feeling... not cold per se, but not really warm either," Voong explains. "During the initial scene, things are tense but there's no aggression. It just seems like there's an absence or something, and that creates this really pervasive sense of loneliness and isolation. It's not the kind of loneliness where nobody is around; it's the kind of loneliness where there are still people, but you still can't shake the feeling, which in a way is a bit more horrifying."
With the chill placed firmly down my spine, we rise from the dinner table to answer the home phone at a parent's command. We wander out of the room and pick up the phone, only to find silence on the other end. Returning to the kitchen, we discover the house emptied. No one is left; we are alone and the door is open.
Stepping outside, life is suddenly shifted. We're in a cavern. We move quickly — we can jump. And a familiar little girl with white hair runs ahead of us. We give chase and watch as the caverns narrow more. And more. And more. Claustrophobia sets in before we're finally let loose into Love Eternal's platforming playground.
The core platforming experience in Love Eternal comes in, blending its floaty jumps with a gravity-flipping mechanic, a la VVVVVV. You make your way through single-screen puzzle rooms, flipping and jumping to dodge lasers and spiked platforms, and make your way through tiny gaps.
It feels good, capturing the energy of precision platforming classics, and there's an ease in understanding its mechanics. It doesn't hold your hand, but it does teach you its gimmicks through gameplay.
They teach you how to get across rooms by flipping gravity, having you do it the first time in a safe space. In doing so, they showcase that Maya's physical momentum plays a big part in its flipping-driven platforming. Her falling momentum will carry through the gravity shift, so timing your actions is key, too.
And right when we think we've got a hold on the platforming, the scene shifts abruptly. We're back home. A head with spider legs grows out of the table and looks at us. It screams and just as suddenly as we left, we're back in the caves.
"Love Eternal definitely has a desire to keep you not knowing," Voong said before our demo. "It wants you to imagine what's going to come next. There are curve balls... and curve curve balls... and curve curve curve balls, but never in any way that betrays what it sets up beforehand."
The sudden shift is not telegraphed — the shift back even less so — and it showcases the storytelling potential of the project just as well as the platforming showcases its gameplay potential.
I entered a flow state while playing the demo, something that allowed me to make it through some of the trickier parts "faster than any other press" up to that point, according to Voong. So you know I proudly wore that badge for the rest of the PAX weekend.
As we wrapped up the demo, I couldn't help but think back to that feeling of loneliness that Voong warned us about from the start. brlka utilizes a few clever tricks to really emphasize it here in their debut work. There's the negative space that surrounds you on any given screen and the tiny presence of Maya, just a blip amidst her surroundings. Most importantly, for my experience, was the dampened soundscape, which is made up almost entirely of your actions.
Checkpoints come with an echoey ringing that floods any space you're in. The patter of Maya's footsteps ground you in between the dozens of deaths that may accompany a difficult room. And the gems that regenerate your gravity-flipping ability in midair shatter with a harshness that dares to interrupt your flow.
Each sound makes its presence known and fills the empty space — the empty background tone — only to remind you how alone you really are.
"With a lot of precision platformers, because you're going to be spending so long on levels that you might be stuck on, you don't really want a soundtrack that's blasting a tune in your ears 24/7," says Voong, explaining how Love Eternal turns the genre's limitations into strengths. "So instead, Love Eternal takes that and goes 'okay, you only get the sounds that you are making and whatever we have in the background.' That turns that lack of a strong melody or anything into something more atmospheric, something people can envelop themselves in."
I only got a brief look at this mysterious platformer, and what I played seems to barely scratch the surface of what the full experience has in store. Whether it's the tight platforming on display, the eerily oppressive atmosphere of its world, or the passion that's exuding off of everyone at Ysbryd who we talked to about the project, everything surrounding Love Eternal has me riveted to see what it is in store when the game launches later this year.
Thanks for reading our coverage direct from the PAX West show floor. If you found it interesting and want to read more hands-on game previews and interviews with developers, visit our PAX West articles. Or check out our recap stream for a behind-the-scenes on what we did, played, and saw during all four days of PAX.
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