Review: Sir Lovelot – PS5, PS4

Nobody said finding true love was easy. Sir Lovelot is the story of one little hero that will do anything to find the perfect girl. He just has a problem with committing.

Our intrepid hero Sir Lovelot is a pixelated 8-bit sex addict. And while that’s no laughing matter, the game is an absolute blast to play. The whole point of the game is to platform your way through two or three screens of spinning blades, venomous snakes, man-eating plants, spiked ceilings, and so much more, all to find a flower and maybe a ring so that the princess in the tower will lower her hair out of the window for you to climb. You just rescued the princess so that must be the end of the game, right? Nope. At the end of each level you climb into the princess’s window, her bedroom lights go out, and a few seconds later big red hearts pulsate out of the window until the sun goes down. Life’s too short for subtlety, I always say…

Then the next morning, hopefully after a healthy breakfast, Sir Lovelot jumps out that window and proceeds to risk life and limb for the princess next door. The struggle is real, folks. That is the game in a nutshell. For over forty levels and forty princesses. That could have grown tedious very quickly but each new level managed to introduce new and interesting enemies or traps, and I couldn’t wait to finish one level so I could see what developer Pixel.lu would come up with next.
Sir Lovelot may live in a cute pixelated world, but make no mistake, it is a precision platformer and a hundred deaths await you if you want to see this little digital Don Juan “rescue” each and every princess. Unlike other, more frustrating, precision platformers, Sir Lovelot manages to keep you playing in a number of ways. The first and most important, are the controls. They are so tight and precise it’s a joy to play even when you’re dying every few minutes. Plus, you respawn so fast, it’s almost like you didn’t die at all. Another way is that once you kill most of the monsters on screen or flip a gate switch, the enemies stay dead and the switches stay switched. It makes even the toughest stages workable if you’re patient. But some enemies, the ones that pop out of the ground once you get close, will respawn each attempt so beware.

Each stage is full of collectibles and hidden rooms. Once reaching the end of a level, I was always surprised to see how many hidden rooms that I missed. It’s kind of amazing how many secrets they tucked into these levels that already seemed so packed. These secrets and chasing better times will keep you replaying these levels even after you conquered the last princess, I mean level. I seemed to be averaging about four to five minutes to finish a level for the first few worlds, but one of the last levels in the third world took me over 25 minutes over two sittings.
Each world featured 11 levels and its own theme. You’ll see typical storybook and forest themes early, but the third world was a cemetery/Halloween theme that had some of my favorite levels. The final world features an appropriate end-of-game lava theme that lets you know things are going to be getting tough. I haven’t finished all eleven of these yet, but the first few have been really cool and developers Pixel Games have managed to add even more surprises for the home stretch.

Every level throughout the game follows the same blueprint, save for the last of each of the four worlds. These “final boss” levels force you to keep moving by rolling a giant stone skull after you Indiana Jones style. It was a cool way to force me to ditch my usual careful and measured approach that saw me average five or six minutes to complete each level and adapt a run straight ahead and deal with the consequences later technique. The final level of world number two is my personal best at just under 50 seconds. I haven’t replayed any level yet, because I’m still working on the last stage, but I’m looking forward to going back and replaying some of my favorites to improve my times.
Sir Lovelot is a lot of fun for gamers of all kinds. Both my wife and son watched me play a few levels and had to try it out. The wife hasn’t been interested enough in any game I’ve played to try for herself in years, and she loved it. Honestly, I don’t think you can play this game without a smile on your face. For ten bucks, you really can’t go wrong, and it makes Sir Lovelot one of the easiest recommendations of the year for me.