on Love (2015)
archived from backloggd. originally posted on 10/19/2025.
a work of pure Love. also the hardest game i’ve ever beat, by far!
Love is Toby Alden’s (AKA brlka) first big game. it is big; a VVVVV-like gravity-bending platformer with a delightful, slightly open map and simple, hardheaded design. the basic shapes decorated by a bevy of spikes are all there is to the platforming. the main thing to get used to is the gravity inversion pull, which you can manipulate in order to move around spaces like a sine wave. you can only swap gravity once after leaving the ground, but many levels have pickups to give you instant charges so you can do some insane precision platforming while bouncing up and down with only gravity swaps.
the main girl looks like the green haired girl from Layla, and she’s stuck in a sadistic castle filled with spikes, lasers, and levers. there are almost no other sprites in the game. gray walls, grayish background, gray spikes, gray angels. the only other main color aside from the protag’s hair is red. red lasers, red switches, red dress, red love.
wrapping your head around the map is one of the biggest headaches you’ll get. it’s not labyrinthine, but reaching new places and returning to previous areas takes a lot of effort. backtracking means you’ll have to do some very hard challenges to get back where you were, even if you consider the shortcuts and simplified routes you can find. the many secrets further the confusion.
Love is difficult. so much that the dev keeps track of who managed to beat it. i think i’m the 11th person to do so. it helps that the game has multiple endings (i know of three at least), but it is super easy to get locked into the hardest route (the one i took) by accident just by being curious and poking around. i’m not exaggerating, i spent almost 20 hours on the level gauntlet that the hardest ending requires you to go through.
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it’s brutal. after so many attempts i tricked myself into seeing a degree of movement freedom in these rooms, but that’s just because if every micro movement adjustment matters, you start to see a couple of different tiny approach differences that make you see things. in reality, this game requires absolute and absurd precision. there’s a room that, in a successful run, takes about ~20 seconds to complete. i spent around 7 hours trying to beat it. the checkpoints get sparser until they become inexistent. you have to beat each screen in one try, while gaps and breathers stop existing as concepts as well — you’ll see the white flash of death every few seconds; sometimes every few tenths of a second.
it’s like the main girl’s deaths never even happened, as if the hours it took you to clear a room were there to give you a taste of what could go wrong, but never did. this unreality makes up for most of the time you’ll spend in Love.
it’s a lonely creation; according to Alden, it took 7 years until someone beat it for the first time. this was their first developed game. playing it feels just as alienating. i needed to focus so much to execute a level that i couldn’t have any background noise or extraneous conversation happening around me when playing it, else i’d constantly slip up. how do you even playtest something this precise? some rooms require not only perfect execution, but a perfect setup as well. if you make the first jump just a liiitle too low or too high, you’ll get rhythm checked midway through the level and die for an almost invisible mistake. you can’t learn from visual or audio cues. you learn from feeling.
clearing the hardest levels in Love is wizardry. you’ll learn quirks in each tiny adjustment you need to make, realize invisible, atonal rhythms and just get the design after trying for hours. i can explain most of what i had to do in each level, but i cannot give you the secret sauce to beating them. there’s so much to see and so much to repeat. it fascinates me that a game this direct and concise exists. platform and see, platform and pray, platform and leave.
again, a work of Love in its purest form. everything it has is everything it is. a platformer for whoever can stand it, or rather, whoever can love it.
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ten years after this first game (and crazy official Mac-only romhack titled Hate), Alden is following up the most unapproachable platformer ever with Love Eternal, a commercial sequel/reimagining/remake. how bold do you have to be to do that? it’s looking gorgeous. i wanna play it so bad…
