You’re a lost soul in Of Love and Eternity

Of Love and Eternity begins its story with a tearjerker: you’re a knight who has been betrayed by your own king, as you watch your beloved ruthlessly killed at the very steps of his throne. But despite the amount of angst the game is setting you up for—the amount of cutscenes, for a demo, is pretty drawn-out—Of Love and Eternity doesn’t seem to be a medieval fable centred around revenge. Instead, its tragedy is more romantic than macabre. You’re now here, in the horrific depths of the purgatory, to save your love from a fate worse than death: eternal damnation.

There really isn’t much to do in the game’s 20 minutes demo, but it, at the very least, serves as a brief teaser to the developer’s grandiose ambitions: to create an expansive survival horror experience buoyed by deeply moral decisions. After waking up in a pile of skeletal remains, you were horrified to discover that you, too, become a skeleton-bound soul, doomed to wander a violent abyss. Upon exiting the mortuary you were in, you can walk through several winding trails in a dense, sombre forest. 

There are a few curiosities you can discover too, such as souls to harvest and fireflies to trap, although what they represent aren’t too clear at this stage. Combat, too, is more bare bones than expected, but seemed to subsist on the same few tenets of survival horror: the vulnerable hero versus their baneful, overpoweringly strong enemies.

Then there’s the game’s grimy, grainy pixel art, which fully conveys the abject murkiness and melancholy of its tale. You can try out the demo yourself at the game’s itch.io page.