Europa Review

Europa is a beautiful game with an intriguing story and a wonderful narrator. All of the achievements are missable, gladly the game only takes around 4 hours to beat. So a second playthrough with a guide to mop up what you missed is very doable.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: Around 8 hours or so, counting on 2 playthroughs
Estimated achievement difficulty: 5/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: It can be done in 1 but most likely you’ll need at least 2
Is there a good guide available: Not yet
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Yes, all achievements are missable
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: I think that you can play on any difficulty and still unlock all the achievements, but not totally sure
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Whoah, Europa is such a beautiful intriguing game. I fell in love with the artwork in the first few seconds of the trailer. It looks stunning! And the narrator they choose is amazing. He does such a good job of telling the story. His voice felt so fitting for this role.

When I started playing I thought the movement felt a bit floaty, but after a few minutes, I got used to it. I’m also so impressed that I always felt like I knew where to go while the game didn’t tell you directly. The level design is built in a way that it is where you’ll be going without having way markers to tell you where you need to go. Another great thing is the world-building is amazing! The narrator will tell a lot about the world, but the state of the world also shows you a lot of the story.

As an achievement hunter, this game will be a challenge. All the achievements are missable. There are achievements for finding everything, while there are no counters to know how many in each area there are (this would be awesome for new game+, but sadly isn’t there), and you can’t go back to previous areas. There are also achievements for not getting hit by boom Beetles and turrets and don’t trigger any bombs. If you go for this in a separate playthrough of finding all the collectibles, you can easily get Alt+F4 out of the game when you get hit. I’m not 100% sure this works as when I played the game, those achievements were bugged but they are fixed by now. (The developer did an awesome job in how quickly they fixed them!). There are also achievements for finding the emerald behind the waterfall (this one is in an area with many waterfalls) and riding a sky whale.

I hope there will be a YouTube guide to show where to find all the collectibles, as the areas don’t have clear names, so a written guide would be even more challenging. I’m not looking forward to playing Europa while watching a guide simultaneously, but I think that will be the way to mop up the missing achievements. And that I’m not looking forward to that is not because I dislike the game, it is just my least favorite thing to do. Written guides, or reading/watching something before playing and then doing it myself is more fun but I don’t think that will work with Europa.

I give Europa 3.5 out of 5 stars.

This review for Europa was written on 5 October 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 11 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.