EUROPA

This Ghibli-inspired adventure looks positively dreamy

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Don’t let all the sunshine and blue skies fool you: Europa is a game made in the dark. Helder Pinto has been working on it since 2017, alongside his day job as an art lead at Blizzard. This is, somewhat unbelievably, the product of his spare time, a side project that started life as some environmental doodling after Overwatch shipped. “I basically made this game between 11pm and 3am, over the last few years,” he says. And there’s something of those midnight hours about Europa itself. The surprisingly lush watercolour landscapes of Jupiter's terraformed moon have a dreamlike quality, especially as you fly and glide across their surface as Zee. This chunky little android might be the last boy alive - but that just lends an air of serenity to his adventure, which has the air of a Lofi Beats To Study To mix on YouTube.