A Review About A Game 'About Love, Hate And The Other Ones'

Tobias Bilgery’s About Love Hate And The Other Ones is, alphabetically, the first game in my steam library. It also requires very little hard-drive space to run and I assumed it would take very little time to complete.

I forgot one vital thing: I’m atrocious at puzzle games.

It has taken me five years from when I first downloaded the game (two laptops ago!), to finishing it just this Tuesday. And that’s because I keep starting it and stopping it.

You see every time I get the “Ah! I have so many games I haven’t played!” feeling (a feeling I assume/ hope that every other Steam user feels on a daily basis) I decide to start going through my games list alphabetically and playing each one to completion.

Then obviously, that doesn’t happen. I believe the last thing that got me frustrated enough to uninstall the game that time was it had just introduced a new kind of obstacle/ ally, the .

According to howlongtobeat.com (an invaluable resource if you’re as competitive as my fiancee or as oxymoronically pedantic about how much time you spend having fun as I am) most people take around five hours to complete About Love, Hate And The Other Ones. As I said, it’s taken me five years. Another thing I found out was that About Love, Hate And The Other Ones won the 2012 German Computer Games Award for "Best Newcomer" . As you can maybe guess from the time-frame it's not a newcomer anymore.

God, it’s a cute game though. And like all the best puzzle games it’s infuriatingly simple at first. You control Love, a little black blob with two cute eyes and a flower sticking out of his head, and Hate, a larger black blob with two angry eyes and spikes sticking out of his head. They’re adorable. You can move them around, they can make short hops upwards or long falls downwards, but that’s about it.

Well, they can also talk to the other ones.

The other ones are also coloured blobs, with more vacant eyes, and Love and Hate can talk to them. Love usually makes them come closer because he’s a lovely chap who people want to spend time with. And Hate makes them walk further away, because all he knows is anger and he can’t express his sadness well and he pushes them away because he’s scared to make friends again after his previous companions broke his heart.

Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it?

A few of the other ones do different things, some inflate if loved, and deflate if hated. Some swap places with whoever talks to them. Some still move but they do other stuff like shoot jets of air you can hover on, or swallow other ones up in their magic hats.

And you’re probably thinking “Oh! That sounds simple! And fun!”

Well it’s not.

It starts off simple, because of course it does, you learn the basic commands like climbing over each other to reach higher places, switching control from love to hate, and what each one does when they “talk” to another one.

Like I said, it was five years since I started playing and I can’t remember what the first puzzle that made me go “Gee! This is getting tricky!” was. I can’t remember what the first puzzle that made me go “DAMMIT! This is pure evil!? How do they expect me to beat this level!?”, either. But I want to say it was near the start of the ruins …

The game doesn’t have much of a story. Love and Hate live on a hill together, one day a button appears and Love pushes it. There’s an incredibly nice sound, there’s a flash of light, and then Love, Hate and the Button are in some caves. The objective of the game is to push the button again, to get to the next zone, and eventually get yourselves home (hopefully!). For most of these buttons you’ll have to move the other ones around to get them out of your way, or use them to give you a leg-up to the button. That’s all you need to know, it’s not the kind of game that relies on tight storytelling.

The game consists of 80 levels split into four zones; the caves, the ruins, the “machine” and the snowy mountains. The art is very cute, soft edged and cartoony. It’s endearing to me, I want to hug pretty much everything in the game, even the robot ones have soft corners. While I’m on the robot ones, I’ve got to talk about the fun zapping sound effect they make when you talk to them. It’s satisfying and pushes all my lizard brain receptors every time I do it. It’s just about the only sound that didn’t get grating.

Every time you get Love and Hate to chat they’ll let out an “I love you” or an “I hate you” and after 80 levels you can bet that got a little irritating. Well Love’s did, honestly Hate’s emphasis and inflection sounds a lot more endearing than Love’s dopey declaration of affection. (I mean dopey in a lovable way, I assure you). It’s not the only nitpick I have about the game, some of the puzzles need you to be very precise with where you place and move the other ones. That starts off being nice, and a tribute to good game design, but honestly by the last few levels I was pushing the “undo” button so much it was starting to get frustrating.

Despite these difficulties, which, I’m not going to lie, mostly stem from my own inability to manage puzzle games very well, I really enjoyed About Love Hate And The Other Ones. And I’d recommend you check it out on Steam, the App Store, or on the page of it's loving developers Black Pants Game Studio.