Europa is chill — its story isn’t

At the risk of being entirely unrelatable: You know that music they play at the spa? That synthy, spaced-out soundscape type of stuff that isn’t exactly music, but isn’t exactly not music? The sort of playlist you can find if you take a wrong turn from your favorite lo-fi playlist? Chord after relaxing chord, interspersed with birdsong, rain sounds, or crackling fire? Well, Europa is that, but in video game form — at least when it comes to its gameplay.

Europa, developed by Helder Pinto and Novadust Entertertainment, is a game mostly about gently floating through cel-shaded environments to soothing piano and electronic music. You play as Zee, a humanoid boy who uses a “Zephyr” backpack to fly through serene landscapes riddled with overgrown ruins and cutesy robots. In its opening hours, Europa feels like it ought to have been titled Beautiful Vista Simulator, as it shuttles you from overlook to stunning overlook, panning the camera out to show off the game’s painterly aesthetic and surprising scope. If you liked the opening of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Europa does that kind of epic zoom-out every 30 minutes or so. (Only a slight exaggeration.)

Taken on vibes alone, Europa is a relaxing experience bordering on the meditative. Challenge is absent here. Many enemies can be disabled with a hug. Puzzles are perfunctory and quickly dispatched. You cannot die. If you are looking for a challenge, look elsewhere. Europa trades in difficulty for the joy of movement as the player explores the nooks and crannies of a gorgeous, if largely empty, world. Besides Zee, that world is populated only by assorted fauna (deer, rabbits, foxes) and an ark’s worth of robots. And it’s the latter population that introduces the game’s most obvious conflict: a sharp contrast between its aesthetic and its narrative.

There’s no shortage of post-apocalyptic games. Europa, for all its chill trappings, is another entry in that genre. Humans have colonized Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, transforming it with AI-produced terraformers into something inhabitable. But not all is well with the mission for a second home for humans. The game is narrated by an old man writing to his son, and you spend your time collecting the pages of his diary, reassembling the story of what happened before you set out on your Europan adventure — a story, as it turns out, that’s fairly dark. As the game progresses, it becomes clear that humanity’s flaws came along with them to Europa, the terraformers having long ago decided to revolt against their creators, deeming humanity antithetical to their directive to create an ecologically sound environment. That conflict spills over into outright war, as humanity abandons the ground and takes to a refuge in the sky.

Without spoiling anything, I will say that, by the conclusion of Europa, the game makes a definitive statement on the conflict between human life and the environment. Yet the questions posed by Europa’s story — chiefly, should humanity be given a second chance at sustaining a planet if they’ve failed and failed again to do anything but destroy wherever it is they call home? — stand in contrast to the experience of playing the game, which is sublimely chill and, as I’ve written, almost entirely devoid of conflict.

In the brief three to four hours it takes to complete the game, you will encounter landscapes unbothered by industry or greed, reading page after page about how humans, even in our desperate flight from a ruined Earth, brought our warlike inclinations to what should’ve been a utopia. In its narrative, Europa explicitly asks the player to consider whether we, as humanity, deserve a Europa. My own answer, watching the clouds roll over verdant hills dotted with unbothered creatures both biological and technological, was, frankly, no. We had our shot. Let them have a go at it. Let someone else have a chance if we’ve wasted our first and second. Let the world reclaim the world and see if a newer, gentler order might arise.

I don’t think the developers would agree with me on this point, but I find it fascinating that the game allows for this reading. Europa has some drawbacks as a game: The camera can often fight you midflight, some sound effects still feel like placeholders, and the periodic deactivation of Zee’s ability to freely glide through the air (as a means of adding challenge) just doesn’t work that well, as it’s no fun to be able to fly and then be told to walk. And, again, if you are looking for a challenge, seek greener pastures (though good luck finding greener pastures than Europa’s).

Yet, while Europa is not a game I can recommend without some reservations, what I admire most about it is its unwillingness to square the circle of its gameplay and narrative dissonances. Having seen where the story lands, I can safely say the contrast is not unintentional on the part of the developers. And while I do find myself personally bristling at the more hopeful inclinations, I admire the fact that, to the end, Europa asks you to decide for yourself what you think of all this. It’s a brave game that gives over such thematic decisions to its player rather than beating them over the head with a desired interpretation. Europa might be the spa music of post-apocalyptic games, but its relaxation asks a deeper question: Do we deserve a greener world? And, if not, how might we change ourselves so that we fit into that greener utopia of which we’ve dreamed so long?

Europa was released Oct. 11 on Nintendo Switch and Windows PC. The author played on PC using a download code provided by Future Friends Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.