Every life has a story. Every story has regret. But what if you could change the past? These are the words that take you into LOVE – A Puzzle Box Filled with Stories.
Story-based puzzler
LOVE is a mix between a puzzle, storytelling, and a point-and-click adventure game where you fill in a book with photos of memories. You interact in both the past and present and get to know the people that live in your apartment building. These are the moments that define their lives – and change them. Their stories are sad and heartwarming. There is however no dialogue going on in the game. The story is all presented in photos of past and present memories. It’s your job to fill in the missing past and present photos to find out the full story.
Puzzles without logic
The gameplay involves you rotating floors of the apartment building (a bit like a Rubik’s Cube) and move from past to present to solve puzzles. Here you search for the inhabitants that are in the photos within the memory book. Find out their story. The puzzles are not clear at all. I found myself just moving all the floors around and clicking everything until I could interact with something. When the gameplay involves puzzles, you can make them hard but easy to understand. What is even the point of making puzzles if there is no logic to them. What also doesn’t help is that you are going through multiple of these story puzzles all at the same time. This makes it harder to understand what is going on since the stories intertwine with each other.
The controls are not great as well. Since it’s a point-and-click game on a console you move the cursor with the control stick. The cursor moves so slowly, I can’t imagine this is a preferred way to play point and click games.
Lower graphics than a Rubik’s Cube
The art style is really bad if you ask me. They have gone for a low-poly look that looks dated. I don’t think anyone looks fondly back on the low poly era, besides the nostalgia of course. When it’s really polished with good textures and lighting it’s ok, but this is not the case here. The whole game looks fuzzy, like your watching a 360p video. The characters in the game only move in simple animations. When they are moving from area to area they just vanish and appear at the destination. This really stinks and makes the game feel cheaper than it already did. The things that do move, move in 10fps. The music in the game consists of one track. The track is pretty good but it has an obvious loop that makes it get old real quick, especially when playing a long gaming session.
Conclusion
This game is definitely not worth the €10 it is marketed at. The puzzles have no logic, the visuals are badly designed, the music consists of a looping track, etc. The only redeeming factor is that the game has some interesting story but even that could have been presented in a better way.
