Loved

Loved is one of my favorite games among all games we’ve played for CVGS. In “On Difficulty in Video Games,” Jagoda reads the game’s title as its first move toward difficulty as it “does not offer any clarity about the identities of the lover and the beloved.” My initial reading of the title pays more attention to the connotation of “love” as a verb and the potential implications of its past tense, which gestures toward the fluidity between love and hate. Many aspects of Loved echo such ambiguous, nuanced, and contradictory relationships between the subject and the object (lover/beloved, sadist/masochist, game/player, etc.) and opposing sentiments and feelings (excitement/fright, anger/placidity, etc.).

As Jagoda noted, if the player follows the often malicious directions given by the game, they are praised as good boys or girls while the world loses its color and plasticity. The platforms and enemies become exclusively black-and-white and take rigid shapes, making it easier for the player to navigate the game. On the contrary, if the player disobeys the directions, they are insulted and the world becomes more colorful and fluid. The colorful blocks gradually take over the screen and deform the platforms. They are visually appealing and fascinating but make the platforms harder to traverse.

Another contradiction that stands out to me is the malicious difficulty versus the generous forgiveness of the game. Although some of the platforms are hard to traverse and are especially difficult when the world becomes infected with pixels, Loved, with its very frequent statue checkpoints, is quite forgiving and gives the player lots of low-cost trial-and-error opportunities. I’m usually an inadequate player but I soon become skilled enough at the game and am able to conquer the pixel-infected platforms quickly. In fact, I didn’t obey the directions in my first gameplay because I didn’t want to die after going through a lot. However, I realized that throwing myself into the barbs cost me very little as I would always return to the forgiving statue, so I started to be the good boy throughout my second gameplay.