Europa review

What is it? A platfomer with light puzzles where you play as a young boy exploring one of Jupiter's moons
Expect to pay: $14.99/£10.99
Developer: Helder Pinto
Publisher: Future Friends Games
Reviewed on: Intel i7-9700K, RTX 4070 Ti, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer? No
Steam Deck: Seems fine
Link: Official site

Let's face it: Earth is doomed and we should start looking for a new home. According to NASA, the best place to find an environment suitable for life in our solar system is Jupiter's moon Europa. Can confirm: I just spent a few hours there and I saw beautiful blue skies, lush green trees, and lots of cute animals. And while I didn't see those massive saltwater oceans NASA predicts, I did find a heck of a lot of jumping puzzles.

Jumping is just one of the things you can do in puzzle platformer Europa: you can also climb, levitate, and glide, and combining all those movement skills means when you leap off the ground you might as well be launching yourself off a cliff. Jump, levitate to gain even more altitude, then sail for ages. It's a freedom of movement not found in a lot of games.

That's why it's a shame that in a game so heavily based on movement, Europa doesn't handle all that well. To make things worse, in a world primed for exploration, there's not all that much to find. Europa's controls are a little too messy and mushy to truly enjoy all the jumping and gliding, and the world, while beautiful, never lives up to its looks.

In Europa you're a little kid named Zee exploring the mysterious moon while piecing together pages from your dad's journal. According to your poppa, earthlings successfully colonized and terraformed Europa but something went terribly wrong: a war began between the human colonists and automatons known as gardeners.

Along with foxes, boars, and deer peacefully grazing in the meadows as Jupiter hovers in the sky overhead, vigilant robotic guardians patrol the world, intent on keeping you out.

Europa is broken into chapters, and each gives you a chunk of