Europa

This game should have been a beautiful and soothing little flow-type. Instead, some terrible design decisions make it almost the opposite: unpleasant and frustrating.

The core problem is that traversing this inviting landscape is anything but a "flow". It's not just that the controls are poorly calibrated and that the camera often doesn't cooperate. It's that the game's systems deliberately make it much worse. The "challenges" you are supposed to overcome are all about slowing you down, obstructing, and essentially annoying you. You're constantly running out of the "flying" energy, which forces you to walk at crawl-speed, and every time you get hit by an enemy or fall down there is an "I'm hurt" animation that stops you in your tracks for an unbearably long time, often enough to be hit by the stupid enemies again. Finally, sometimes instead of walking you "slide", which is barely faster than walking and is much less maneuverable. It ends up making things harder rather than easier. I would groan every time "sliding" happened to me.

And, seriously, why are there enemies in this game in the first place? You don't fight them, you can't die, and there are no stealth tactics. All they do is pointlessly slow you down.

Do you like collectibles and achievements? Well, they are all missable, and many of them are crucial to the game's story. That's one of my most hated design choices in video games: Why punish people who aren't so good at video games with a fragmentary narrative experience? Yeah, have fun with those.

Even if these problems were fixed, there's just not a lot to Europa. The landscape is pretty, but its elements are repeated again and again. The prettiness wears off fast. Puzzles are very trivial, just busywork that is made annoying by the awful traversal mechanics.

Europa is very disappointing.

I gave it a on Steam. Respond to this review there.