Systems: Windows, Linux, macOS
Release Date: TBD
Publisher: Acorn Bringer
Time Spent: ~30 Minutes
Of Love & Eternity (OL&E?) was a strange demo that really felt more like a proof of concept for world and atmosphere-building than actually showcasing anything resembling a finished game. There is a brief intro that shows a King figure killing an armored woman, followed by an armored man who rushes in and immediately mourns the loss of the killed woman. The King then kills the man, who then passes through a visualized cosmic etherealness and comes to as a skeleton in a dungeon and is approached by a death-like figure and given a load of exposition. The remainder of the demo is spent running through hallways in a forest, reading descriptions as they come up on the screen, punching at nothing, and collecting some form of firefly-like light source which is then used to bypass moths (I think) to cross a makeshift log bridge to rest and contemplate at a campfire. That's more-or-less it. Maybe about 30 minutes, maybe less if you don't backtrack like I did.
Let's get to some of the technical details and get those out of the way.
Visuals appear to be a big part of how developer Acorn Bringer wants the game to be viewed. By default, there is a pixely and graininess to everything that makes it feel like you're watching something decades old, but different in the way that the game might have looked on PS1 hardware. There is the option to turn off the film grain and the pixeliness, but there is also the odd option to totally make the game unplayable by reducing the game to a mess of large pixels so that it really only retains the color scheme of the rest of the game. Wo to the person who sets the Dither to type xXx, Size: X, and 4 Color Steps and accidentally backs out of the menu. I'm sure that there's a way to immediately fix this, maybe backing out of the game entirely resets the resolution/dither. You can also turn off the dither effect completely, but I really feel that that takes away a lot of the charm. Yes, visually it does look a bit better, but it's almost like trying to play an SNES game without a CRTV filter turned on. The image is crisper and the lines are more defined, but it doesn't feel good.
Secondly are the controls. This being a third-person perspective game with a movable camera, I looked for an "Invert Y-Axis" option but couldn't find one, so this led me to frequently look up at the sky or down at the ground whenever I would turn. It did become a little easier the longer I played, but I was somewhat thankful that there wasn't any combat because I felt like it would not have ended well for me.
I didn't have any issues running it on the Steam Deck. There was a windowed pop-up config menu when I started the game that required me to manually pull up the mouse and I just left it on the settings that were there by default; I can't remember what the actual resolution of the Steam Deck's screen is so I left it as is. The only other thing I would change controller-wise (apart from adding the option to invert the Y-axis) is that the B-button had the same function as the Start/Menu button, which brought up the menu/question if you wanted to return to the main menu. Not that it happened, but I could see myself accidentally hitting the B-button when I think I'm wanting to cancel something, then again accidentally clicking -Yes- to go back to the main menu.
It's hard to say what kind of game Of Love & Eternity is trying to be. As mentioned, there is a punch button which implies that there is going to be some type of fighting mechanic. How fights would operate I am unsure about. The atmosphere and the fact that you play as an undead knight running around in a forest with ruins scattered about implies (there's that word again) that it might be somewhat Soulslike. Still, it could also end up being closer to the targeting/fighting started with Ocarina of Time. It definitely doesn't feel like there's going to be a horde rush mode however, or maybe there will be no actual combat and the punch button will only be used to solve environmental puzzles. It's hard to say judging from just the 30 minutes in the demo.
But what is presented here, I very much enjoyed. I liked the graininess (ditheriness?) and I liked the occasional thunder and lightning claps that put me on edge. I like seeing ruins off in the distance, backlit by blue lights and an eerie cemetery filled with red lights. I enjoyed being constantly on edge not really knowing what was going to happen in the fog-filled forest.
I look forward to seeing what will become of this game.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
The Ancient Falls
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