Youropa is a visually striking puzzle platformer that has fairly novel but ultimately unremarkable gameplay.
You play as a vaguely humanoid statue, and at the beginning of the game, your only power is to walk along surfaces. Any surface like a stair or slope will cause gravity to “align” with you, resulting in you being able to walk “upside down” on levels if you can find curved slopes that allow you to go around the edges.
This is the game’s core gameplay mechanic, but as you go on, you acquire additional abilities – the ability to grab objects, kick things, run, jump, and eventually cling to walls, the last of which renders the rest of the gameplay more or less moot, but is only for the last few stages anyway.
The game gets pretty good mileage out of its mechanics, though; there’s not a whole lot of them, but it does a reasonable amount with them, creating a bunch of puzzles that require you to figure out how to navigate the level successfully. Walking around works pretty well, though when you gain the jump mechanic, it can feel a little bit janky at times, particularly when you have to run and jump. Still, it gets the job done.
The game’s levels are pretty good looking – much more so than I expect from a random indie game. Most of them are pretty small, but their nature as floating bits of Paris, displaced by… some weird event gives them some amount of character. There’s a few rainy areas that are particularly good looking, but a lot of the game looks pretty solid, though some of the later levels end up looking a bit odd because the jump mechanic breaks up the solid platforms, making them feel more arbitrary.
The puzzles vary a bit, but they are almost all very simple. However, being simple isn’t the same thing as being easy; the game is frequently about having some key insight into how you can manipulate the various parts of the level in order to better progress through it.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem with the game is that the core mechanic can lead to situations where a lot of the levels’ “puzzles” really being “find that one spot that you overlooked where the floor is curved so you can walk around on it”. This was a frustratingly frequent issue, with a number of points where I got “stuck” involved not being able to see where I could go because the level was too subtle in its design or even deliberately hid the curve in an out-of-the-way spot.
The game is brief, which is a major point in its favor; if the game was much longer than it was, it would wear out its welcome. Instead, it’s got only about 40 levels in it, most of them fairly small and compact. It will likely take you about 5 hours to beat the game if you just try to push through it, and maybe a bit less than twice that if you try to collect all the collectibles and do all the optional challenges.
Much as I thought that the core mechanic of walking around on walls was neat, the game never really wowed me on the whole; I was left feeling rather ambivalent about the experience by the end of it.
If you like puzzle platformers, you can do worse, and it looks nice; however, if you were to never play this game, I don’t feel like you’d really be missing out on anything. As such, I can’t really recommend going out of your way to buy and play it, but if you did end up with this game by chance, and you are into puzzle-platforms, it might be worth a whirl.
2.5