Not to be confused with Eskil Steenberg's free Love , Fred Wood's recently released Love+ is the sort of sordid, seedy love you have to pay for – but not that much, as it turns out. A couple of dollars, or around £1.23, will get you all the loving you could possibly want – well, if the loving you want is from a C64-style platformer with brilliant music and some fantastic modern features.
Love+ is based on Fred's 2008 freeware title Love , and while it might bear a superficial similarity to Terry Cavanagh's more recent VVVVVV, the two aren't all that alike. Love+ features more traditional murderous platforming action, although with one welcome addition: the ability to place a respawn point on any solid surface. On its normal mode – there's also a casual difficulty and an Ironman mode – the game also makes use of extra lives. You start with 100, which probably sounds like a lot until you tumble to your doom three seconds in.
The best feature, however, is the bundled level editor, which has the power to create whole 10-level campaigns based on images you supply. So if you want to create a rock-hard platformer out of a gallery of lolcat pictures, you're in luck. Having said that – don't do that.
Do check out the two-level demo of Love+, built to convince you to give its Greenlight page the thumbs up. And if you fall for the game, you can buy it for the cost of a cheap supermarket sandwich. Lovely trailer below.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.
US Air National Guardsman gets 15 years for leaking military secrets on a Minecraft Discord server: 'The scope of his betrayal is breathtaking… the amount of damage immeasurable'
Yakuza/Like a Dragon creator Toshihiro Nagoshi says his studio's new game won't be that big after all: 'it's not modern to have similar experiences repeated over and over again'