Youropa - Demo
7I saw this on the eShop, and it looked interesting and had a demo, so I decided to give it a try. This might not be the most interesting video I put up though, as it's completely unedited because I didn't have much time left in the day, but I suppose it can make for an interesting topic of discussion, as well as another point to make, which I'll describe below.
Youropa is a game that is best described to me as "hit-or-miss." This phrase works for everything about this game, from its presentation to its gameplay. Presumably to accomodate as many languages as possible, this game is conveyed in as few words as possible (though not none at all), though it does make the opening cutscene something of a head-scratcher. From what I can tell, some cataclysm happens to Paris (and presumably the rest of Europe, hence the title) that scatters pieces of the city, along with the Eiffel Tower, into the air, where they then hover, free of gravity in any particular direction. The inhabitants caught in them are drained of color and frozen where they are...except one, which is the player character, caught in a rope that prevents the same fate from occurring. Somehow.
This character, who can be recolored and given a face as desired, can then walk around, going from place to place using ramps, stairs, and curved surfaces to walk along walls, ceilings, and any other angles in between. Sharp angles and sharp corners will not let you change your gravitational direction, and you just fall as if it's a bottomless pit instead. You cannot jump, so you must find alternate ways of progessing forward. Presumably, once you make it all the way to the end, Paris is restored, as are the Parisians caught up in this.
I'm not sure, because I didn't make it to the end. You see, this is because the game doesn't set up a consistent set of rules for you, or at least one that was given to me all that well. Curved paths, I learned, allow me to change gravitational direction, and sharp edges, well, do not. Except once I got far enough in, and suddenly some of the sharp edges do, whose pattern I still don't quite get. Having a firm and consistent set of rules is important to a game about solving puzzles, and Youropa is undoubtedly a puzzle platformer. But because it doesn't feel consistent, it's hard and oftentimes frustrating to try to work out a solution, because the rules you think this game follows might not always provide your answer because it might involve rules you didn't know about. Hence, I don't think I ever got past what I think is the tutorial area. I can't imagine how obtuse things might become later on.
Because I couldn't make heads or tails of what this game wanted me to do, I eventually got stuck. And because there wasn't anything compelling me to keep moving forward, I decided to end the demo early. It's a bit of a disappointment, because there were many other aspects of this game that I thought was executed superbly. The visuals are gorgeous, with a lot of detail put into background objects and textures to make every little bit of land feel real. Your player character doesn't need a face to be incredibly expressive and really feels like someone overwhelmed with the extraordinary circumstances around them. And the use of color as your character's HP meter is something unexpected but pleasant all the same. (Paper Mario: Color Splash made a lot of use of this, I recall.) As far as indie games go, it is quite ambitious.
It just feels like it wasn't play-tested through, or play-tested by the right people. The people who make a video game are also the ones who know that video game best, after all, so what is be obvious to them is not always what's obvious to your players. I think this is the biggest flaw in how Youropa plays. There were some things I could not figure out, or patterns I could not fully understand, that I'm sure felt obvious to the game's staff.
Or maybe it's just me and it's obvious to you. What do you think I should've done to get unstuck from where I was?