LOVE
Year: 2019
Rating: E
Time Played: ~1 hour
When it comes to retro-inspired video games, most seem to pull their influences from the 8-bit or 16-bit systems like the Nintendo Entertainment System or Sega Genesis. Rarely have I seen something that seems to take their cues from further back in the video game pantheon. For all their limitations, Atari or Commodore 64 games still had a distinctive style that made them stand out prior to the boon in the home gaming space dominated by Nintendo and Sega. LOVE feels like an extremely polished Atari game—which is both a good and bad thing.
Platformers have always been a simple game to make on limited hardware. All you need is a few pixels that the player can move around on the screen and a variety of platforms to jump onto. LOVE takes this common idea and puts it into a mostly monochromatic, heavily pixelated space that could have been pulled straight from the home video game market of the early 1980s. The aesthetic is on point, even if it’s much more refined than I think any computer of the time could replicate. These levels are gorgeous, which is fortunate for how often you’ll be dying in them.
Another facet of retro games is how brutally hard they are. LOVE takes this in stride and provides a challenge that’s just frustrating enough to keep you playing but not too frustrating that you’d give up. With 100 lives, you’re meant to conquer the dozen-or-so levels. Since there’s a lot of iterative learning, it’s not difficult to get a handle on the game and work through all it has to offer in about an hour. The short length and insane difficulty is also a hallmark of retro games, which isn’t necessary in today’s gaming landscape.
A much older retro-inspired platformer, I give LOVE 3.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
