Europa Review (Switch eShop)

Europa is a puzzle-platformer that’s light on puzzles and platforming, set on (and named after) the moon of Jupiter. This indie title from Novadust Entertainment and Future Friends Games combines pretty expanses of green with futuristic elements. Its playthrough and story aim to both rouse your inner child and give you philosophical food for thought. Generally, all these things could make for a good game. But while none fail here, none really excel either.

As the game takes off, you hear the voice of your father, inviting you to Europa "if you ever get lonely." You take control of Zee, an android in the form of a young boy who totters past Adam’s gravestone (the father in question) to explore the land. You get a jetpack which you use to hover and glide through each area.

Europa is very hands-off, without much of a tutorial, bar instructions for controls. That can be good, but here it means there’s no clear objective. The game largely focuses on upgrading your jetpack, while you move through each section to an unrevealed end goal. You collect Crystal Stars to increase the jetpack’s Zephyr capacity – indicated by glowing bars on the device itself. If you run out, you can recharge it with glittering blue spheres around the space.

The actual gameplay won’t exhaust you. Puzzles include collecting wisps, pushing items, and lighting lanterns. They’re intriguing and satisfying to solve – albeit sometimes a little too simple. If you are looking for a challenge, there are optional collectibles to stretch your capabilities. The platforming itself is light and its margins for error are wide, though the clunky controls can prove to be an obstacle (more on that later).

Europa’s idyllic scenery emits a calming vibe, that affords you lots of breathing space. It’s both relaxing and rewarding to move through each section, gliding through the air or skidding over water or grass. Defying gravity with the jetpack is fun, too; zipping around elicited a ‘weeeee’ from us. The game seems to want you to take it easy: there’s no health bar, no combat, no fall damage. Recharge spheres for your jetpack are so frequent you never stress about running out of power – even with areas that stop you from blasting off altogether.

We enjoyed these peaceful moments, but it’s unclear how much of the peace is supposed to be maintained. Gardeners (machines that look, act, and are even named similarly to Breath of the Wild's Guardians) shoot you down, and flying critters knock you out of the air or drain your Zephyr. Even though you don’t die, the booming, ominous blare jarringly disrupts the presumed peacefulness. When combined with Zee’s slow rebound – he barely stands before he gets hit again – these attacks impede what we thought was a serene experience.

The story could have been an emotional father-son narrative with impactful and thought-provoking questions about the environment. Unfortunately, every question Europa asks left us confused, and the overall narrative feels lost in orbit. It’s told through letters Zee’s father left for him. As you collect and store them in your scrapbook, you can play them aloud while you run and fly, which we enjoyed – it reminded us of hearing a bedtime story. Adam was an engineer on this moon who studied and experimented with local creatures. His letters describe Zee’s curiosity and ability to connect with these creatures in a way other humans couldn’t. The letters ponder humankind’s footprint on natural life, though it’s contradictory to hear this while that same natural life assails you. Any potential environmental message is never fully realised.

We couldn’t spoil the ending even if we wanted to because it went over our heads. To be clear, we are not opposed to open-ended stories or, indeed, games that get players to fill in the blanks. But in this case, the blanks are so vast that our attempts to fill them in failed. Perhaps we’re missing the point. Perhaps the monsters are supposed to clash with the player, the same way nature does with humans on Earth. But the plot is too inconsistent for that message to land.

Now, let’s return to those controls we mentioned earlier. On Switch, at least, movement is fiddly, with Zee sometimes swerving or walking further than we wanted him to, or moving so slowly he gets blasted by Gardeners. Novadust has assigned three types of jump to ‘B’ that you sometimes need to use in immediate succession. It’s okay, until ‘B’ also makes platforms appear and disappear as you’re trying to land on them. The camera also zooms too far in or out at times.

Europa’s best feature is its Ghibli-esque art style. The setting is gorgeous: sweeping grassland, with steampunk-influenced artefacts. You can practically see the mood board: wide shots of BOTW’s Hyrule Field complete with Guardians, as well as the plains of films like Howl’s Moving Castle. It’s a shame that once things start moving, they break the magic. The animation is clunky and movement is inconsistent.

When music is present, it amplifies the calmness, with slow-tempo piano and woodwind sounds that swell nicely when you get a reward. But there are parts without any music at all – just the occasional wind whistle or leaf rustle. It gave the game a foreboding, lonely sense which, again, might have been the point, but, again, seems at odds with the meditative mood in other areas.