izigame.me

I should preface this by saying that I would prefer to give a neutral review, neither recommending or not. I really wanted to like this game. There's so much to recommend here, but the end result is not as great as it should be. And I don't mean in a "I got hyped by Peter Molyneux before release and nothing can live up to my expectations" kind of way, I mean that the dev's vision is so simple and clear, but the delivery falls flat. What could go wrong with a stunningly beautiful Ghibli-esque setting with movement and puzzling like Journey, and a lovely story behind it all? Well, a lot I'm afraid.
Firstly I never thought that I'd complain about a game that's all about floating for being too floaty, but here we are. I don't mean the levitation though. It's just that there's no sense of weight to your movements. To make matter worse, the controls are clunky too, and the world pushes back on you both literally and figuratively all the time. That's not even mentioning how you're given a vast beautiful landscape to explore, then gated off from almost all of it.
As an example, very early on you're walking through a gorgeous canyon when a series of wide flat ledges come into view that set off your spidey senses--there must be something up there! A nice view at least, surely?--but you really shouldn't bother trying to reach it. Not only can I guarantee you there is nothing there, but you might spend a minute devising a way up only to hit an invisible wall in midair, or have the wind at the edge of the map blow you back off the cliff, or worse, blow you into a crevice that you could escape from if only the wind would stop blowing, but it won't stop until it has blown you far enough away from the edge of the map, which it can't because of the crevice, so have fun reloading. It's like this absolutely everywhere--every hill, every mysterious stone machine/creature, every sunken building--you can get stuck, or bounce off of things, or slide uncontrollably past your landing zone, or stop to "climb" a ledge the character should have stepped up without stopping, or stop and not climb at all when you reach a ledge that looks the same size as all those other things you climbed automatically, and you lose your flow. And that's the crux of my complaint--there's no flow to Europa.
Again and again the game will stop you to pan the camera around when you should be moving, put a levitation recharge point awkwardly low to the ground or out of your path, or put a "boost pad" in your path when you have just arrived in a new area and want to stop and explore. There's no way to keep your flow going when you just want to zip around. Similarly, the buildings that you can enter mostly look identical to the buildings that you can't, and the same goes for landscape features--a lot of the time a promising hill is just a bump on the map with no reason to go there. All of your instincts from years of playing games will be frustrated.
So what about the beautiful vistas? In a game this pretty, can't I accept that sometimes a cliffside ledge is just a ledge, and enjoy the view from up there without any other reward? I would love to, believe me I've spent hours enjoying the view in less pretty games than this, but sadly the camera in Europa doesn't cooperate. It won't spin around to let you, the player, actually see the view. The camera has a strangely large "personal bubble" and won't go near any solid object, so you're stuck looking at Zephyr's disturbing little face as he takes in the view that you are denied.
All told, this is a game that should be about the fun and beauty of exploring that actively punishes your efforts to explore, and that's just sad.