I FOUND LOVE ETERNAL IN A STEAM SALE NOBODY TALKED ABOUT — AND IT'S THE BEST CATHERINE CLONE YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED

I Found Love Eternal in a Steam Sale Nobody Talked About — And It's the Best Catherine Clone You Haven't Played

I was three pages deep into a Steam Halloween sale, the kind where the algorithm gives up and just starts shoving anything with the word "horror" into your recommendations. That's when I saw Love Eternal — a thumbnail that was a pixel-art nightmare of floating corpses, with a title in jagged red font, and a price slashed to $9.99. There were no reviews, no wishlists, just a game that looked like it was made by someone who had seen Catherine once, dreamed about it, and then coded their fever dream in a basement for two years. I bought it on impulse. Twelve hours later, I was still playing. Brlka — a studio name I'd never seen before — has made something rare: a game that understands why Catherine worked. Not the romance sim parts, not the anime cutscenes, but the raw, vertigo-inducing terror of a platformer where gravity is a suggestion and death is the only teacher. Love Eternal strips that core down to its skeleton, douses it in lo-fi horror, and rebuilds it as something scrappier, stranger, and — dare I say — more intimate than its inspiration.

The Gravity of Gods (and Other Things That Want to Kill You)

Here's how it works: you play as a nameless soul trapped in a purgatorial tower, climbing upward while a pantheon of cruel, squid-faced deities rearranges the laws of physics just to watch you fall. One moment you're leaping across floating platforms; the next, the screen flips upside-down and your controller rumbles as the world inverts. It's Super Mario Odyssey meets Silent Hill 2, if Mario was a suicidal office worker and the coins were replaced with screaming faces embedded in the walls. The game's greatest trick is making you feel the weight of every jump. Brlka uses sound design like a cudgel — every footstep echoes in the void, every misstep is punctuated by a wet, meaty thud as your character ragdolls into the abyss. There are no checkpoints, no hand-holding. Just you, the tower, and the knowledge that every death is permanent, another corpse left floating in the dark for the next climber to see. This is where Love Eternal diverges from Catherine. Where Catherine was a puzzle game dressed in horror, Love Eternal is a horror game that happens to be a puzzle. The stakes aren't "lose your progress"; they're "lose your sanity". The tower remembers your failures. The gods taunt you with them.

The Developer's Underground Pedigree (and the Publisher Who Gets It)

Brlka is a new name, but their fingerprints are all over this. The studio is a collective of ex-indie devs who cut their teeth on zero-budget jam games — think LIMBO if it was made by people who'd only ever played LIMBO once while sleep-deprived. Their previous work, The Last Faith ($20K budget, crowdfunded), was a Metroidvania that wore its Blasphemous and Castlevania influences like a leather jacket — cool, but not pretending to be anything it wasn't. What's more interesting is the publisher: Ysbryd Games. These are the people behind WORLD OF HORROR ($15K budget, 2020), that Junji Ito-inspired RPG where you investigate Lovecraftian horrors in a pixel-art town that feels like it was drawn on a napkin. They also published Demonschool ($50K budget, 2023), a turn-based tactics game where your party of misfit college students fight demons by, essentially, throwing textbooks at them. Ysbryd doesn't just publish games — they publish weird, handmade experiences that feel like they were made by someone's deranged little brother in their bedroom. And make no mistake: Love Eternal is the most deranged of the bunch.

Why This Isn't Just Catherine with a New Coat of Paint

Let's be clear: if you go into Love Eternal expecting Catherine's narrative depth or Atlus's polish, you'll bounce off it hard. This is a $30K game made by people who were more interested in making you feel like you're trapped in a nightmare than in telling a coherent story. The writing is minimal, the voice acting is either non-existent or intentionally stilted, and the "lore" is delivered in cryptic, half-burned journal pages you find scattered throughout the tower. But that's the point. Love Eternal isn't trying to be Catherine. It's trying to be the midnight screening version of Catherine — the one where the film print is scratched, the audio cuts out at the worst moments, and the ending is deliberately unsatisfying. It's punk rock horror, the kind of experience that thrives on its own imperfections. Here's how it compares to other games in the "horror platformer" space:

• vs. Catherine (2011): Where Catherine was slick, Love Eternal is jagged. Where Catherine had a fully voiced cast, Love Eternal has whispers in a language you don't understand. Where Catherine punished you for failure, Love Eternal makes failure feel like part of the story.
• vs. Celeste (2018): Celeste is about...