My wife gets so excited when it starts to rain on a dark summer night. She loves to open the windows and just soak in the peaceful sounds of the raindrops. Sometimes, she reads a book with that noise in the background. Sometimes, she just closes her eyes and takes it in.
I operate a bit differently on these kinds of nights. A nighttime rain delivers an undeniably tranquility, but after a few minutes, I’m usually content. I had my moment of zen, and now it’s off to do something.
Playing Europa feels a lot like taking in the rain on a beautiful night. It’s an incredibly relaxing game. It has beautiful art direction and lovely music. But “playing” it is often kind of mindless in the same way that taking in the rain can be. Depending on your mindset and your mood, a game like that can be incredibly valuable. But at times, it can feel like you’ve seen all you need to see after a few minutes.
Luckily, Europa has just enough strengths where even I was even able to enjoy some mindless relaxation for a few half-hour play sessions.
I Usually Start Reviews By Talking About Gameplay, But The Music And Art Direction Are Actually More Important Here, So I’m Starting With That. I Had No Good Way to Work This Point Into The Review. I‘m Sorry For Failing As A Writer.
While you don’t purely walk, the easiest way to describe Europa is probably as a “walking simulator.” Europa is as much about being an “experience” as a video game. You play as a small boy exploring a gorgeous looking world. There is a floating island off in the distance that is the clear objective that you need to go towards. As you travel to the island, you can find pages in the world. These pages are a diary from the boy’s father that slowly tell you where you are and how things ended up where they are today.
Europa nails its atmosphere, which is so vital for a game like this. It is yet another example of how important art direction is over fidelity. Europa has a Studio Ghibli-esque look to both the design of the lead character and to the vibrant environments that you explore. While there is no photo mode in this game (on the Switch, where I played it. There is one on PC), Europa does wisely zoom out when you enter many of its different areas so you can truly take in the luscious grass, the bright sky, and the peaceful clouds. While most of the game has a similar type of look to it, you are taken to a few different biomes for short stretches that help mix up the views that you get as well. By the end of the two and a half hour journey, some of the wonder of these vistas wore off, but it’s an undeniably gorgeous game throughout.
Europa also does well with its music, which really adds to the aforementioned atmosphere. As you’d hope in a game like this, the music is peaceful and fits the general meditative vibes that the game is going for. My only complaint is that it is almost too understated in spots. There are times playing where I barely noticed it, almost like the kind of music you’d want to study while listening to. I feel like the developers may not have wanted the music to overpower the visuals, but I thought the music actually enhanced those visuals a lot when it made itself known. I wish it had done so a bit more often. But when the music hits, it is truly lovely as well.
Well Shit, I Guess We Gotta Make This A Video Game Too
While the main appeal of Europa is definitely the visuals and music, it is still a video game. Unfortunately, it does not succeed there on the level of the visuals and music.
Once again, your main objective in Europa is to head to the floating island in the distance. Your companion on the journey ends up being a jet pack. If you find energy in the world, you can use this to fly and float wherever you want. There tend to be lots of energy clouds in the air that you can use to keep a float going for a fairly long time. Keeping yourself in the air is probably the best part of the gameplay. The flying mechanic controls fairly well, and it’s undeniably cool to get high in the air and slowly float to the ground with beautiful views in the backdrop.
The rest of the gameplay doesn’t fare quite as well. When you aren’t using your jump pack, your other main method of traversal is a standard jump. This controls in a really floaty and imprecise way that I never felt great about. The game doesn’t throw any particular difficult platforming challenges at you, but I still never felt great about tackling them because of how wonky the jump could feel. Europa also throws a few very light environmental puzzles at you as you head towards your objective that are mostly designed to get you to explore each area a little more, but didn’t really add much to the experience.
Europa also encourages you to explore with various collectibles scattered across all of its environments. One of the main things you can find are crystals that allow you to float for longer with your jetpack. These are definitely rewarding to find since the jetpack is the best part of the gameplay. There are also optional emeralds scattered throughout the world. While the game tells you that there are forty of these, they are really easy to miss. The game also doesn’t tell you what these are for until the very end of the game. I imagine trying to find all of these would add a fair bit of extra time to the game, but between being relatively well hidden and not having any obvious incentive to do so, I mostly didn’t bother with them.
I often found myself not bothering to do any extra exploring in any capacity because the game doesn’t give you any indicators of how much there is to find in any given chapter. I didn’t want to spend a bunch of time looking for things that weren’t there, so I just didn’t attempt to at all. Simple icons in the menu that tell you how many crystals and emeralds are hidden in each chapter would be a really simple fix that would greatly incentivize more exploration.
The most important thing to find in the world is the aforementioned journal pages that tell the game’s story. Luckily, these are almost always very obvious and easy to find thanks to big beams of light that shine down on them from afar. It’s a nice enough story with obvious but important lessons, and I thought that it was told relatively well. The pages are read with voice acting from Earl Fisher that is really outstanding. His performance greatly enhanced the story, as you feel the love that he had for his son throughout.
I was somewhat surprised, given the nature of the game, that there are also a few “action” elements to the game. There are some leftover turrets and mines placed in some of the levels in the game. They can’t hurt you or give you a game over (at least I didn’t experience one despite being hit plenty of times), but if you get hit, they can slow you down. I didn’t really see the point of this, as it doesn’t add anything in particular from a challenge perspective and can at times disturb the general “zen” of the game. A recent patch allows you to play the game without these turrets, and I actually think that would probably be a better way to experience this.
If Only I Played This Game When I Was Sadder Or More Stressed
One of the more important things to consider when reading a review is that it is purely based on one person’s opinion. The other thing to always remember is that the reviewer’s perception of any video game could change drastically depending on many factors. I have had many games that I didn’t care for on my first go, and then suddenly worked better for me on my second or third time around.
I enjoyed Europa quite a bit, but this is a game that might swing based on your own mood and mindset more than most games. I wonder how I would have felt about this game if I played it in the days after my dog died, and I desperately needed some peace. I wonder if it would have soothed me if I had played it when I was stressed out about potentially losing my job a few months ago.
I didn’t play Europa in either of those circumstances. I played it while feeling generally pretty good about things. And while I enjoyed the experience, it wasn’t necessarily the game I *needed* in the moment I played it. Because of that, while I appreciate the things that it does well, I also found myself underwhelmed at times. In the end, Europa was a nice respite from life for a few hours, and nothing more. There is certainly value in that, but I wonder if it could have been even more than that for me with a few extra tweaks.
Score: 7.0/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
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