Youropa was revealed all the way back in August of 2019. The puzzle game was part of an Indie World presentation and I even got to play around with it at Gamescom that year. While attempting to tie together multiple unique ideas taken from a lot of inspirations, Youropa unfortunately didn’t manage to leave an impact on me. While its puzzles are inventive and it has an interesting aesthetic, the slow pace and progression make Youropa feel like it's at the end of its rope far too quickly.

I remember as a kid playing around with a toy that was a blank action figure that you could draw on top of using wipeable markers. In a sense, Youropa has a similar protagonist. You play as a nameless blank figure with a large head. At the beginning of the day Paris is upended by a gravity distorting event that leaves the city in floating disconnected pieces. It’s up to you to reconnect these floating pieces of the city and solve puzzles to provide them with power. The twist is that you can distort gravity by walking over rounded edges and slopes, which causes gravity to twist and turn with your perspective. The best shorthand for this is how you can walk on the edges of planetoids in Super Mario Galaxy to reach the bottom side of the same planet. However, when you step off a ledge, gravity returns to normal and you fall to your doom. Aside from this being the main mechanic, each district has its own set of puzzles and mechanics giving you new abilities to explore these floating rocks.

If you’re into physics based puzzle games like Portal, The Talos Principle or The Turing Test, Youropa is probably a game you’ll love playing around with. As much as most puzzles boil down to 'provide power to the switch‘ or ‘open a door by placing an object on a button’, the gravity-mechanic always feels engaging and required to solve these puzzles. Placing a box on a grounded floor and then walking up the same wall to grab that box from the wall to carry it upwards feels pretty inventive for a genre that tends to rely on performing the same task countless times before reaching the end.

But with Youropa its not the mechanics that start to wear thin but its lack of character and personality. The blank protagonist you play around with can be recolored using stickers, paint and all sorts of decorative items. But the character rarely feels like you. There’s an option to share creations online with other players, but even when finding these designs it never made me really connect with the world or its inhabitants. From the alien looking enemies that resemble dogs and giants to its floating levels that have great puzzles but become a slog to traverse. The movement is slow and this makes puzzles feel like they take far longer than they need to. Especially when more physics based puzzles come around the corner and you’re required to line up items with the right angle before kicking or tossing them across edges. The game also employs frequent game overs, meaning that you often have to restart levels when enemies push you off the edge and have to start at the last door you’ve accessed. It’s not bad per se, but it tended to wear me down quickly while playing the game.

What I did find interesting was the many hidden collectibles in each level and their unlocks. If you find three mixtapes in each level you get additional parts. These parts can be used in the custom level creator, which allows anyone to play around with building their own levels and sharing them online. It’s a surprisingly extensive level editor and there’s quite a bit of attention put into the learning of how you can combine and extend levels to create full worlds. It’s great that the game is about inspiring collaboration, sharing and creating a world together. But it wasn’t a particular aspect of the game that enticed me, mainly because I think most levels already do a great enough job of exploring the game’s mechanics and I didn’t feel like tossing my own head in the ring because of that sluggish pacing.

Thankfully the game runs good enough on Switch. While not a locked framerate, the game uses some nice shaders and lighting effects that make it stand out from the rest. It’s just a shame that your weird avatar will probably look very out of place among the photorealistic textures of Parisian streets and objects.

Youropa left me feeling quite ambivalent about the final product. As a puzzle game it has some clever mechanics and explores them with plenty of abilities to extend your playing experience for quite some time. However it must be said that this playtime feels extended by a sluggish pace that makes exploration and even some of the puzzle solving feel exhausting at times. The game runs good enough on Switch and for those who like trying their hand at creating games or levels of their own, Youropa has plenty to offer here. But if you’re looking for something with its own personality or a story that will keep you engaged while solving these puzzles, you’re going to have to pull some other strings.