Love+ is all the retro platforming you need

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.

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.