Love Eternal Is the Most Unsettling Game I Played at PAX East 2025 | Hands-On Impressions

It begins with something cozy. Familiar.

A quiet suburban home. You’re in your room, when a voice floats up from downstairs. “Dinner’s ready.”

You shuffle to the kitchen. A hot meal waits. The table’s been set with care. Your family smiles as you enter. Everything feels ordinary. Safe.

Then the phone rings.

You sprint off to the Living Room to answer it.

Silence.

No static. No voice. Just… nothing. Weird, right? Maybe a wrong number.

You go back to the kitchen, only now, it’s empty. The food’s untouched. The chairs are still tucked in. Your family is gone. And all that is left is the eerie stillness of an empty room… and the side door, hanging wide open.

So you step outside, barefoot.

And then you run.

That cozy, familiar safety dissolves, replaced by cold, numbing corridors. You don’t know where you are, or why. Only that you have 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 platformer that disguises existential dread in a nostalgic wrapper. Beneath the game’s familiar retro surface pulses something far more sinister, and it quickly became one of the most quietly unnerving and memorable games I experienced on the PAX East 2025 Show Floor.

Love Eternal marks the haunting debut of developer brlka, a sibling duo of Sam and Toby Alden. Together, they’ve crafted a game that feels like a long-lost Flash-era gem, only to twist it into something far more unsettling. Equal parts razor-sharp platformer and psychological horror spiral, it lures you in with nostalgia before turning it against you. Sam brings the world to life through hand-drawn pixel art and eerie animation, while Toby, best known for his cult hit Love, returns to refine the punishing mechanics and minimalistic design that earned the original its devoted following. Under the brlka name, the two have created something that’s not just a spiritual successor, but a descent into something deeper, stranger, and unforgettable.

“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 either. Checkpoints are generous and 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.” The early sections ease you in with single flips and clean landings, creating a rhythm you can comfortably 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 emotions.

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, and thin, insect-like limbs unfurled from beneath his chin, lifting the head like a monstrous puppet. It’s a perfect distillation of the game’s overall vibe: Love Eternal doesn’t just want to challenge you mechanically. It wants to haunt you emotionally.

“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. Oh, I could… but I was still impressed. 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 rattled. Not just from the platforming (though the gravity flipping will absolutely scramble your brain), but from that sick, sinking feeling I’d felt earlier. Like returning to the kitchen again and realizing, with cold certainty, that whatever warmth had been there was never coming back. 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.

• Title: Love Eternal
• Developer: brlka
• Publisher: Ysbryd Games
• Platform: PC (Steam)
• Release Date: Late 2025
• Wishlist on Steam : Love Eternal

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Love Eternal proves you don’t need AAA polish to make something terrifying. What matters is understanding. And these developers understand horror. They know what it can do when it’s allowed to breathe. They know how it can creep under your skin and settle there, so far in, it sinks into your bones. 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.