Europa was launched in August 2019. This puzzle game was part of the Indie World presentation and I played it at Gamescom that year. While trying to connect multiple unique ideas from many inspirations, Yuropa unfortunately failed to impress me. With its slow pace and progression, Youropa feels like you’re at the end of the rope too quickly.
As a kid, I remember playing with toys, blank action figures that you could draw on with wipeable markers. In a way, Europa is a similar protagonist. You play as a nameless blank person with a big head. At the start of the day, Paris is turned upside down by a gravitational distortion event, and the city rises to pieces, disconnected. It’s up to you to reconnect these floating city fragments and solve puzzles to empower them. The twist is that you can distort gravity by walking on rounded edges and slopes. This twists gravity and rotates it in your perspective. A simple explanation for this is how you can walk on the edge of an asteroid in Super Mario Galaxy and reach the bottom of the same planet. However, once you step off the ledge, gravity returns to normal and you doom yourself. In addition to this being the main mechanic, each district has its own set of puzzles and mechanics, offering new abilities to explore these floating rocks.
If you like physics-based puzzle games like Portal, The Talos Principle, and The Turing Test, then Youropa is probably going to be your favourite. As most puzzles boil down to ‘power a switch’ or ‘place an object on a button to open a door’, the gravity mechanic has always been fascinating, solving these puzzles Placing a box on the ground and then walking up the same wall to pick that box off the wall and carry it up tends to rely on doing the same task over and over until you reach the end. It’s pretty original for a genre that has.
But in the case of Europa, it’s not the mechanics that start thinning, it’s the lack of character and personality. But characters rarely feel like you. There is an option to share your creations online with other players, but even if you find these designs, you won’t really connect with the world or its inhabitants. Up to floating levels that have puzzles but are hard to traverse. It feels slow and puzzles take longer than they should. Especially when more physics-based puzzles come around the corner, requiring you to line up items at the correct angle before kicking them or throwing them over the edge. to the game his over occurs. That means you often have to restart the level if an enemy pushes you over the edge and you have to start with the last door you accessed. It’s not bad per se, but it tended to tire me out quickly while playing the game.
What I found interesting is the many hidden collectibles in each level and their unlocks. These parts are available in the Custom Level Creator, allowing anyone to build their own levels and share them online. It’s an amazingly extensive level editor, with considerable attention paid to learning how to combine and expand levels to create complete worlds. It’s great that the game inspires collaboration and is about sharing worlds and creating together. Mainly because I think most levels already do a good enough job exploring the mechanics of the game. Pacing.
Thankfully, the game runs well on the Switch.Although it’s not framerate locked, the game uses some great shaders and lighting effects to set itself apart from the rest. . It’s a shame that the weird avatar probably looks so out of place among the photorealistic textures of the streets and objects of Paris.
Europa left me feeling very ambivalent about the final product. As a puzzle game, it has some clever mechanics and explores them with lots of abilities to make the playing experience considerably longer. , even some of the exploration and puzzle-solving can feel tiring. There are a lot of them.