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Europa is a relaxed 3rd-person 3D adventure with beautiful environments, a bittersweet story of humans and their exploitation of the environment, and very easy puzzles.
1. Story & Setting
You play as Zee, who appears to be a young boy exploring the Jupiter moon Europa. Europa has been terraformed by humans into a lush and vibrant world, but the humans are long gone, only overgrown ruins remain. As you explore, you keep finding diary entries from your father, which gradually reveal the story of Europa and its human settlement.
I like the story's general message, but it certainly didn't knock my socks off. It remains very superficial and descriptive and is all told through the voice of an old, jaded man. There are only three characters (the father, the son, and an unnamed starship captain), most of the time there's just talk about what "the humans" or "the gardeners" do. The story never provided any hooks to draw me in emotionally, it has very little relevance to the gameplay, and it's also extremely predictable. It does enhance the game, but remains a little stale.
2. Gameplay & Mechanics
The game has 15 chapters. Most of these consist of a linear sequence of areas, separated by doors, and you have to solve a small puzzle or action task to open the door. The puzzles and tasks are usually very easy, but can still be annoying due to slow movement or clunky controls. You usually always know what to do. While there is no map (which can make orientation difficult at times), points of interest are clearly marked by light pillars.
The game tries to keep things fresh by gradually adding new puzzle mechanics, but since I never saw a need to actually switch my brain on, they eventually felt like chores rather than an engaging experience. From about halfway through in my playthrough, I started to feel a bit bored and mainly wanted to get it over with - though I did eventually run into interesting environments that renewed my interest. But for the most part, I would have enjoyed the game more if the chapters had been shorter and/or if the puzzles had been more challenging. Also, given that the movement was very clunky already (see below), going through sequences where wind gushes kept throwing me off my path felt extra annoying.
I should clarify, though, that I regard very little of the above as a "problem" of the game. The dev is very clear that he was aiming for a "zen-like" experience. The repetitive and easy puzzles are perfectly in line with this goal. It just also creates a playstyle that feels a bit too passive for my personal tastes as a player.
While progress through the game world is entirely linear, many areas leave a bit of room for exploration. Veering off the beaten path may get rewarded with a collectible. However, apart from those, there unfortunately isn't much to find. All buildings are empty, there are no additional notes or other lore elements, and there are no resources to collect. On top of that, the world is full of invisible walls and areas that you can never enter because storms keep pushing you back.
What discouraged me most from exploring, though, is that the game kept taking the camera controls away from me in order to show me scenes that it found interesting, and then blocked me from moving the cameras to the scenes I actually wanted to explore. As a result, I never truly felt like an explorer who was discovering interesting vistas and sights. Instead, I felt more like a visitor who was taking a guided tour that someone else had prepared for me. A more passive player might enjoy this type of presentation, but I would have liked the game more with an option to turn the guided camera off.
A third gameplay element are obstacles such as mines, turrets, or projectile-shooting enemies. They cannot hurt you (you do not even have a health meter), all they do is hurl you a few meters back and stun you for a moment. Since there is never any actual danger and movement is clunky already, this is more annoying than challenging. It can be turned off in the options.
The game does offer a few collectibles as an incentive for further exploration.
3. Graphics & Presentation
Europa uses low-poly graphics to create beautiful, imaginative, diverse environments. For reasons I find difficult to pinpoint, they did not really "click" with me. In some areas, I would have liked a higher resolution, sharper lines, and/or more detail. But I think that something in the art direction just feels a bit off to me. I played many other games with low-poly graphics and didn't have the same reaction to those. I'm quite sure that this is a "me" problem, though, I doubt that many other players will feel that way,
Sound and music are functional and stay mostly in the background. Voice acting is provided by a single actor who reads the diary entries that you find. He has a memorable, gravelly voice and his acting is competent, but a bit more variety wouldn't have hurt.
4. Usability & Accessibility
The game provides standard display options (screen mode, resolution, FPS lock, Vsync), a brightness slider, 4 presets each for texture quality, AA, effects, shadows, foliage, and post-processing, and 4 volume sliders to finetune your acoustic experience. Subtitles can be toggled on or off and changed in size. Keys can be fully rebound, and both mouse axes have their own sensitivity slider and can be inverted separately. It's nice to see a game implement those features so competently in a world where many triple-A offerings struggle with standard features such as key rebinding.
Unfortunately though, the game provides no accessibility features whatsoever. This is a missed opportunity since the game targets an audience of "passive" players, doesn't usually require quick reactions, and lends itself fairly well to be enjoyed by players who may need more time to grasp a scene or make an input. Perhaps some features like visual audio cues or color blind filters can be added in a patch.
The game's biggest problem (imho) are the controls. They are intentionally floaty since the game's movement is a mix of walking, sliding, flying, and gliding. But that created many situations where I missed a platform I intended to land on, or fell off a ledge that I intended to stay on. Together with the fact that I often couldn't move the camera the way I wanted to, this made traversal feel uncomfortable in a game that is mostly about traversal. It's the reason why I won't go for the collectibles after having finished the game - I just never got comfortable with the movement.
The game provides a "chapter select" function that helps hunting for details and achievements you may have missed, which is nice. Many games forget that.
5. Conclusion
Personally I'm a bit lukewarm about this game - I did enjoy it enough to finish it, but I felt a bit bored at times. I think it's mostly geared at "passive" players who like a relaxed and relatively guided experience. The more active and challenged you want to be, the less you'll probably enjoy this game. But if you're in the target audience, I think it has the potential to be a great experience, hence it gets my recommendation.