Quick Review: Youropa

Ooh, I’ve always wanted to visit Paris! Maybe not like that, though.

We're actually upside-down right now!

A creation of frecle released on June 27th, 2018, Youropa is about Paris tearing apart and taking to the skies. Our character, a humanoid white shape all covered in paint, finds itself in the ensuing mess, and must find its way around the floating pieces of land, while dealing with all the strange gravity-based happenings. The paint on your character is also its health bar, and you can see it fall away anytime it gets hurt, falls, or gets splashed with water.

We're gonna kick some balls. Hey, this IS set in Europe,
we just have to play football. (That's how they call soccer.)

Gravity is… strange. The direction of the character's gravity is entirely tied to the floor they’re walking on. If you moved from the ground to a wall thanks to a round floor, its gravity changes accordingly. If, however, you step off a ledge, you’ll become subject to normal gravity (read: pulled downwards), no matter what your current orientation is. If you’re upside-down? Part of the game is keeping in mind how gravity affects you relative to the world. Thankfully, you can press the mouse wheel to get a full view of the mass you’re on (and in which orientation you are – to know where “below” is), and to press the alt key to see a map of the game world and where to go next.

The chunks of Paris are lovely this time of year.

When it comes to abilities, all you can do at first is walk around. You gradually unlock new skills, like grabbing items or kicking them, both needed to solve later puzzles and defeat enemies. Midway into the game, our character learns to jump. Even later, they learn to run by holding down Shift. Further down the line, they finally can stick to walls in the middle of jumps.

Did anyone catch the number of the bus that
ran me over?

There are little touches that give the game some flavor; if you land after falling from too high, the character is dazed and regains consciousness by you clicking the mouse five times, shown around its head like circling birdies. You can change your character’s look while standing on spots that serve as spawn points; alternately, you can get splashed by paint from cans lying around. You can even pick up spray cans and paint statues or graffiti walls. Finally, every level contains three pink tape cassettes. It’s a bonus challenge to find them all. The Eiffel Tower area has ten of those.

Considering you die if the paint is completely washed off
your body... yeah, rain's bad!

I mentioned that the character’s health bar is represented by the paint on their body, which peels off as they get hurt; so yes, you can get a Game Over in this game, but all it does is that you reappear at the latest spawn point, the same you would have reappeared at if you had just fallen off the stage. If there isn’t a greater penalty for a Game Over than there is for losing health, why bother?

The game comes with a level editor, for which you unlock new pieces with every pink cassette you find, as well as a Challenge Mode that opens when you beat the story and reach the top of the Eiffel tower, putting Paris back together in one piece as a result.

There's also the occasional gameplay change, with
moments where we use cars, pogo sticks, bicycles...

Design away! (An "erase" button would have been nice.)

As far as puzzle platformers go, this is about as straightforward as it gets; its main issue is that in a genre oversaturated by gravity-based gameplay, Youropa struggles to set itself apart. It does so in the details – the inexplicable plot of having to reassemble a city and its most famous landmark, and the paint-based elements. The first hour is kinda dull, boiling down to walking around the maps as we lack every other skill, with only the pretty sights and the mind-screwy gravity to make it interesting. The camera often shifts on its own, which isn’t great; but it’s nice that we can look at a stage from afar to find new details. The bonus features and occasional changes in gameplay are pretty cool, too.

(To be honest, maybe I’m just burnt out on puzzle platformers after covering so many, but I don’t want that to reflect negatively on Youropa; it’s not the game’s fault.)

Youropa is available on Steam for 14.99$ USD. It’s also on Switch.