Youropa is a rather bizarre puzzle game that opens with an upside down view of the Eiffel Tower floating into the sky, along with various chunks of Paris’ streets.  Your character is a faceless humanoid who appears to come to life once paint falls on it, after which you’ll begin your sky-high adventure by traversing the pieces of the city now inexplicably floating miles above the ground.  Although your character can’t jump (I hear that skill comes later), you do have the unique ability to walk anywhere your suction cup feet can take you, including sideways or even upside down.

I began the demo painting my character with an abundance of eyeballs before I realized that other brushes were available.  After my discovery, I accidentally exited out of the painting menu, and the game was giving me no second chances.  It was only after my mistake that the true gameplay began.  You travel between different floating chunks via these blue doors, and each location has three hidden cassette tapes.  I learned online that these tapes unlock new parts for making your own levels and puzzles for your friends to solve, which I suppose is a cool extra feature.  Another idea that I liked was how your health is shown by your diminishing paint.  Whenever you take damage, you start to lose paint starting from the top of your head, which is an interesting replacement for a standard health bar.

The game is described as “a gravity defying puzzle platform paint adventure, about breaking rules, being upside down, and thinking outside the box”.  As far as the demo was concerned, I didn’t exactly engage in any rule-breaking, merely exploring this acrophobia-inducing world, with the main puzzling coming in the form of stepping on switches.

After stepping on four switches and lighting up this circle in the middle of one of the floating islands, I learned the ability to look around the level from a distance, which kind of seems like something that should have been unlocked from the start.  (Then again, if this option had already been available to you, then you could have already solved a puzzle you had encountered earlier and ended the demo much sooner.)

The rest of the demo consisted of solving two more puzzles where you must light up squares of a larger rectangle to form a certain pattern.  The correct pattern can be found by looking around the current location for hints.  The first solution was very easy to spot, but the second one was more well-hidden.

While Youropa is an interesting concept, the demo was quite slow-paced, and I felt like it was an odd choice to make the playable character so generic.  Sure, they clearly made your character a blank canvas so that you could paint it to your liking, but I’m not sure if any amount of paint can give our protagonist any real personality.  Nevertheless, it would seem that most people who played the game seemed to enjoy it, and I hear that your character gets more abilities later on that should make things more interesting, like the ability to jump, move objects, and…use a pogo stick?  (Okay, that one’s a bit random.)

Youropa certainly sounds like a unique idea.  Nevertheless, the demo didn’t really wow me enough to encourage me to buy the full game.  But if you’re interested in a different sort of puzzling experience where you can defy gravity, then I believe Youropa is available on Switch and PC for $14.99 and can take 5-8 hours to complete.  Though you might want to do yourself a favor and wait for a sale, as I’ve seen the price drop to between $5 to $7.50.