Love is Dead is a pretty middle of the road puzzle game. You play as a pair of zombie lovers, whose goal is to find their zombified pets after the end of the world. This sounds like a pretty interesting premise, but while the game definitely has a quirky sense to it, in the end, it is a pretty standard puzzle game.
The game works fairly simply – you are on a 2D level grid, and you move around space by space. There are a number of different obstacles that you have to overcome, with each of the obstacles varying by level – each of the seven zones of the game introduces a new set of obstacles, many of which mostly appear in that section of the game and then not so much afterwards. This generates a bit more of a sense of variety, rather than mere additive complexity, but there are a few levels later on which bring back old puzzle pieces.
In most of the levels, your goal is to do some task, then reunite with your lover (i.e. the other zombie). You can switch control between the zombies, or play the game two player, but be warned – if either lover dies, you have to start the game over. These tasks are generally pretty simple – typically eat however many humans (who tend to flee from you) or gather treasure pieces and return them to various points (or simply collect them). The game does its best to get in the way, throwing a variety of environmental dangers and enemies at you.
The game is pretty simplistic, as befits its simple graphics – there’s no real combat to speak of, but you can walk into most enemies to kill them. However, the catch is that many have weapons and will kill you if you simply approach them straight up, requiring you to get them to whiff with an attack, then attack them while they’re recovering.
In addition, there are various staples of such games – moving platforms, collapsing platforms, buttons you step on to activate stuff, cannons that shoot projectiles at you that you have to dodge, ect.
You also can pick up powerups in some stages. These do various things, from make you invincible to bullets, to shoot stars, to make it so you can walk over electrified areas, to hide from humans in a box like Solid Snake. These are mostly fairly gimmicky and often only appear in one or two levels, but they all serve their purpose reasonably well.
As an added bonus, all of the stages had pancakes in them; you had to collect at least 99 of them to beat the game, unless you took some of the secret shortcuts, but they were mostly fairly easy to collect. These pancakes were a reasonable secondary objective, though in some cases they very much seemed like an afterthought.
On the whole, the puzzles are reasonable enough; only one level – the first one where you find giant bugs which chase and kill you – was I terribly frustrated by the game’s mechanics, because it gave no direction on how to get past them… because the only way to do it was to just run past them and hope they didn’t catch you. Outside of that, they mostly were reasonable enough, and the solutions were fairly obvious once you thought about it – it was mostly a matter of execution.
All in all, this game is utterly inoffensive. However, it also isn’t something that I can really recommend; it was never a bad game, but it never wowed me in any way, either. It’s pretty average, truth be told, and is probably around 10 hours long (I AFKed a bunch while leaving this game open). If you get this for free, and like puzzle games, it’s okay, but it’s the sort of thing that is pretty forgettable, something that just blends into the mass of indie games on Steam.
2.0