Europa is a charming, chill experience inspired by low-friction exploration games like Journey. You play a child with a jar strapped to his back that serves as a jetpack, allowing you to jump, boost, and glide across a painterly world that feels like a marriage of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and a Hayao Miyazaki watercolor.
As you explore Europa, you gather journal pages left behind by your father, who has sent you ahead of a human colonization effort. The game is set a thousand years in the future, where terraforming has transformed Jupiter’s icy moon into a lush paradise full of ancient ruins, friendly animals, and insect-like robots evolved from the terraforming bots. The controls are a little loose, and the puzzles are basic, but, to be fair, the demo is only the very beginning of the game and lasts less than 30 minutes. The experience is calming and pleasant — a nice change from all the Big, Expensive Adult Video Games coming out this fall.
There is a tinge of melancholy to the story, as the timeline of events isn’t clear. You encounter these servant robots, but not the humans they were created to serve. Are the ruins from some long-lost alien civilization, or is it the humans themselves who died out long ago?
There are no answers to these questions in the very brief demo of Europa currently available on Steam, and part of me hopes the full game doesn’t have them either. The store page promises players will “discover the story of the last human alive.” As you glide through the gorgeous world, you collect energy to extend your flight time and emeralds just for fun. The pages of your father’s journal provide some folksy hope about the power of resilience, along with some charming drawings, and the calm ambiguity of it all is more satisfying than any big revelations about what happened on the planet.
Europa is currently set for release sometime in 2024.
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