The beautiful, mysterious platformer Europa has been at the back of my mind ever since I saw one of its trailers, so I was excited to try its first public demo available on Steam. The game seems to offer a more meditative, relaxed take on the exploration-heavy 3D platformers of the '90s, and I'm more excited than ever to get my hands on the full game when it arrives April 16.
Europa first caught my attention with its trailer in the preamble to the 2022 Game Awards, which showcased its stunning art and exciting concept: an exploration-focused platformer set on the titular terraformed Jovian moon. It's been cooking a lot longer than that, though, with the game first showing up in our reporting circa 2018, with an early teaser that's since been taken down.
Europa's glide mechanic, painterly style, and mossy, sandstone ruins reminded me immediately of Breath of the Wild, but a better comparison might be Spyro the Dragon. The demo presents a linear sequence of contained, but open-ended little areas to glide and jump around in, with emeralds, glide boost upgrades, and mysterious journal pages to collect.
And it's all absolutely lovely. Europa is an extremely lightweight game, demanding only a dual-core CPU and a 1GB VRAM graphics card—hardware that was low to midrange over a decade ago. Despite that, this game is utterly gorgeous. It was a pleasure just to hang out in Europa and soak it up, the peaceful piano soundtrack and lush vistas making for a nice contrast with the massive gas giant Jupiter looming in the skybox at all times.
The platforming in the demo was fairly easy, though what I played mostly consisted of the tutorial for the full game. That said, the vibes alone could carry the day here, and there were a few hard-to-reach areas or alternate paths that demanded clever use of the tools at my disposal.
The narrated journal entries from the protagonist's mysterious father threatened to be overbearing, but the writing really carried it for me. Europa seems set up to be an environmentalist parable, with the narrator cryptically intoning that "The sins of the past can stay on Earth." Something seems to have gone wrong on Europa as well, though, if all these ruins are any indication.
Europa's demo has me more excited than ever for its release, and we don't have long to wait. The platformer is set to come out on April 16, and you can wishlist Europa or try the demo for yourself on Steam.
