A hand-drawn Sokoban puzzler about two opposite forces solving rooms together, short and a little rough around the edges.
Official art · via Steam
Despite a title that reads like a visual novel, About Love, Hate and the other ones is a Sokoban puzzler: you swap between Love and Hate, two characters who attract or repel the creatures and blocks scattered through each room, and push, pull, and redirect them into place across roughly 60 hand-drawn levels. An undo feature keeps experimentation cheap, and there's no scoring system pressuring a replay once a level clicks.
The art carries a lot of the appeal on its own, a hand-drawn, pencil-crayon "euro-cartoon" style that draws easy comparison to The Triplets of Belleville. Themed worlds, caves, ice, castles, factories, introduce new mechanics gradually enough that the puzzle logic never outruns the tutorial, and the attract-repel core stays legible even as later rooms stack more moving pieces into it.
Around a quarter of the levels feel similar enough to each other that the back half loses some of the freshness of the opening worlds, and the difficulty overall runs lower than the genre's toughest entries, so puzzle veterans looking for a real wall won't find one here. DarkZero clocked a full playthrough at a handful of hours, and with no scoring system to chase, there's little pulling players back in once the credits roll. A real, recurring settings-reset bug shows up across Steam Community threads posted years apart, and the click-to-navigate controls take a level or two to click.
The 79 Metascore attached to this game online belongs to the original iOS release, not this PC port, which effectively leaves the PC version uncovered by critics. Steam holds it at roughly 90 percent Very Positive across more than 800 reviews; the review count is too low and the game too old for Steam to break out a separate recent-review score.
Buy it. A tight, good-looking puzzle box that respects the hours it asks for, worth the price even with the length working against it.