It starts with something familiar: a quiet, cozy suburban home. You’re in your room when a voice calls out from downstairs, it’s time for dinner. You head to the kitchen. A hot meal sits waiting, the table carefully set, and your family is patiently waiting for you to join them. It feels safe. Ordinary.
Then the phone rings.
You sprint off to answer it.
No voice on the other end. Just silence. A wrong number? Maybe.
But when you return to the kitchen, your family is gone.
No screams. No signs of a struggle. Just an empty room… and the side door left wide open.
So you step outside, barefoot.
And then you run.
Suddenly you’re somewhere else entirely, lost in a maze of sterile corridors and impossible geometry, with no idea what’s happening. Only the sense that something isn’t right, and that you have no choice but to keep moving.
“Sometimes horror just calls, and it doesn’t wait for you to put your shoes on,” said Kyle Voong, Video Producer at Ysbryd Games, as he guided me through the opening moments of Love Eternal, a genre-warping horror precision platformer that smuggles surreal dread into its nostalgic packaging. Beneath its comforting, retro aesthetic lies something darker, and it quickly became one of the most quietly unnerving and memorable games I experienced on the PAX East 2025 Show Floor.
Love Eternalis the debut title from brlka, a two-person sibling team, Sam and Toby Alden. Equal parts precision platformer and psychological horror experience, the game conjures that elusive flash-era nostalgia, then weaponizes it. Sam leads the hand-drawn pixel art and animation, while Toby handles programming and game mechanics. While it’s their first release under the brlkaname, Love Eternal builds on earlier foundations, namely Toby’s cult classic Love, a minimalist platformer with a brutal difficulty curve and a killer chiptune soundtrack.
“Love really laid the foundation. I’ve been describing Love Eternal as a love letter to the Flash era of platformers. There’s inspiration from VVVVVV, the Jumper series, and The Company of Myself. But it also draws from a wide variety of inspirations aesthetically. Satoshi Kon is a big one. There’s something metaphysical in how the game presents itself. It’s all about getting you into a groove, then disrupting that with the horror elements.”
Love Eternal constantly messes with your sense of normalcy, from environmental storytelling to its carefully layered mechanics. I felt its influences almost immediately. The game’s pixel art feels clean, readable, and inviting, like it could’ve existed in a browser window circa 2008 , but it’s haunted by flickers of something far more sinister. Rooms repeat with subtle wrongness. Gravity turns on its head. Literally. The core mechanic is simple and instantly legible: you can jump, and you can flip gravity. One tap sends you soaring to the ceiling. Another brings you back down. It’s an elegant, rhythm-driven system: intuitive to pick up, but deceptively deep.
Precision platformers are often synonymous with punishment: laser beams, saw blades, thirty deaths on the same screen. Love Eternal doesn’t shy away from challenge, but it isn’t out to humiliate you. Checkpoints are generous. Restarts are instant. The difficulty feels personal rather than adversarial. “It’s definitely more forgiving than Love. The checkpoint system makes it more accessible without removing that tension.” And the tension builds with purpose. Early sections are approachable — single flips, clean landings, a rhythm you can settle into. But just when you start to feel in control, the game throws something new at you: the Red Gemstone, a glowing pickup that lets you flip gravity twice in a single jump. That one change opens the game up dramatically. Suddenly I was thinking in curves, chaining movements mid-air, threading through laser grids, and skimming past spiked ceilings. The core gameplay may be minimal, but the depth it achieves with just a few smart modifiers is impressive. “It’s about adding dimension,” Voong said, as I struggled through one of the demo’s more demanding segments. “People get really hooked on the physics, how the gravity flip feels, how precise the movement is. And once they’re in, we start layering on the rest.” But Love Eternal isn’t just testing your reflexes, it’s also toying with your nerves.
What really sets the game apart is how it weaves unease into its progression. As I pushed deeper into the demo, the sterile corridors became stranger. More distorted. And then I saw her: a flickering silhouette just ahead, darting through doorways, a figure that looked exactly like me. So I gave chase. Through a gauntlet of increasingly punishing jumps, I followed her, always just out of reach. Until finally, after a grueling stretch of puzzle-platforming, she slipped through a door. I followed. And the world shifted. With a flash, I was no longer in the maze. I was home. The same house. The same empty kitchen. The same uncomfortable silence. All the doors are locked. It’s quiet. Still. And then, back in the kitchen, a disembodied head – your father’s, presumably – floats at the dinner table. As I approached, it began to twitch. Thin, spider-like limbs unfurl from beneath it. A sickly, insectile monster unfolds where a comforting memory used to be. It’s a perfect distillation of the game’s thesis: Love Eternal doesn’t just want to challenge you mechanically. It wants to haunt you emotionally. It wants to twist your memories into something grotesque.
“Ultimately, to not give anything away… Love Eternal is one of those games you’re better off knowing as little as possible. We want players to fill in the blanks, let the imagination do some of the work.”
For those wondering how long this spiral into emotional gravity hell might last? Kyle estimates a dedicated playthrough could take just one sitting, assuming you’re proficient. For the rest of us, the game is built to accommodate pauses and retries. There’s no rush. The house – or whatever nightmare it is trapped in – will still be there. And it’ll look stunning the whole way through. Love Eternal’s visual design creeps up on you. At first glance, it’s clean and minimal: retro in palette and perspective, with bold blacks, stark whites, somber blues and heavy reds. But the longer you stare, the more it unsettles, evoking a timeless, liminal feel, a kind of dream logic rendered in pixels. There’s a precision to its sprite work, a quiet weight behind every animation. Rooms feel both claustrophobic and vast. Empty space hums with menace. It’s haunting without being overwrought and eerie in how much it suggests rather than shows. “Would you believe this is made by two people?” Voong asked proudly. Sam Alden’s animation gives every sprite a sense of presence, while Toby’s design keeps the controls sharp and grounded. Together, they’ve built something that looks minimal but feels meticulously crafted.
By the end of the demo, I was sweating a little. Not just from the platforming (though the gravity flipping is no joke) but from the eerie stillness that came after. The team is aiming for a late 2025 release, and while the demo is brief, it left a deep impression. The horror elements feel fresh, not forced. The platforming has real bite. And above all, there’s a sense of control, of restraint, that I found deeply compelling. Voong was deliberately tight-lipped about the story, and I didn’t press. I didn’t need to. Sometimes it’s better not to know too much before stepping into the unknown.
