When I was 10 years old, a friend and I went into the forest and started digging.
Now, the exact reason why we were digging escapes me. But we often did a lot of digging. Kids—particularly boys—like to dig. It's just fun. Started with sandboxes. But we decided to move further afield. And there we were with our big shovels, just digging a hole.
Four feet in, we found something.
A shoe.
One with a bright red high heel, to be exact. A pointy heel.
And when we saw it, both my friend and I looked each other in the eye, dropped our shovels, and ran home in a panic. We had a distinct fear—that if we kept on digging, we'd find something grisly. Something macabre.
Now that I’m older, I laugh. Because the reality is: if we’d kept digging, maybe we would’ve found nothing. Or maybe we would’ve found another shoe. Perhaps the pair. Perhaps a different shoe entirely. Beats me.
But there was just something about that shoe—cartoonishly red—that created in us a sense of panic. We never went back to that spot in the forest.
My parents got really angry at me. Because I lost a shovel.
When I first played Oozi: Earth Adventure on PC, it was like uncovering something buried. And bright.
To give you context, I gotta tell you a little bit about what Oozi is.
So, Oozi is a 2D platformer about a fun little alien guy who crash-lands on Earth. He has to recover his space suit, spaceship, and dignity. Along the way, he encounters numerous creatures—all of which want to kill him. You hop through each level from A to B, gradually progressing. There are four worlds, each with a distinct theme, a variety of enemies, and boss fights.
Okay—so far, this seems par for the course.
But once you dig further into what Oozi is, it uncovers something bright and distinct. Something I’ve known about for decades but couldn’t exactly put into words. Something familiar. But I haven’t been able to articulate it—until now.
I’m talking about the Euro platformer.
Now, what is a Euro platformer? Well, obviously—it’s a platformer game. But it’s distinct. For cultural reasons, platformers developed in Europe diverged from the ones made in Japan and North America.
Euro platformers tend to be extremely colourful—almost surreal. Punishing in their difficulty. And if you’ve seen a Euro platformer, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I mean games like Rayman, James Pond, Zool, Rick Dangerous, Dizzy, and Mayhem in Monsterland.
Actually, before I go further—let me talk about the mechanics that make Euro platformers different.
They often have floaty jumping physics. Specific tropes—like dripping water from ceilings that can kill you. Europeans, for whatever reason, really loved that trope. And they often pushed the puzzle aspect of platforming into the foreground.
I first encountered Euro platformers on my Commodore 64—which makes sense, because the C64 was huge in Europe. Probably bigger than in North America. Which is impressive, because here in Canada, the C64 was pretty popular too. That was my main gaming platform instead of an NES. And because it was so popular in Europe, I’d often find Euro platformers—sometimes pirated on floppy disks if they weren’t available in stores.
The first Euro platformer to really make an impression on me was the Dizzy games. Funny enough, you play an egg. Not an animal—an egg. Like I said, those Europeans loved their surrealism.
Later, I moved onto something more fantasy-themed: Stormlord. To this day, I think that game is a hidden gem. People don’t talk about it enough.
Then, when I got myself a 16-bit console, I got exposure to even more Euro platformers. Again—we didn’t call them that back then. They were just platformers. But I distinctly remember going to Blockbuster and renting Euro platformers like James Pond, Chuck Rock, and Zool.
Risky Woods is kind of a deep cut—probably because it was made in Spain—but that one’s definitely worth playing.
By the mid-90s, you could argue that Euro platformers were the best platformers.
Donkey Kong Country, made by Rare in the UK, might be the best Euro platformer of all time. Others might argue for Rayman, made by Ubisoft in France. Both those games have the hallmarks of the Euro platformer: overwhelmingly cheerful and bright, a touch of surrealism, and a real degree of difficulty. Their shiny, colourful exteriors masked real trial and tribulation.
As the '90s went on, the Euro platformer—like all platformers—went 3D. Rayman 2, Kao the Kangaroo… and most notably, Croc.
Croc is notable because it was supposed to be a second-party Nintendo game starring Yoshi. It’s highly probable that Croc inspired Mario 64, because Argonaut Software—based in the UK—showed a demo of Croc to Nintendo before they started work on Mario 64.
Nintendo passed on it. So Croc became a crocodile instead of a Yoshi—and launched on the rival PlayStation. One of the first 3D platformers ever made.
Because of the rush to 3D, 2D Euro platformers fell by the wayside. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone—most 2D platformers did. And the few that stuck around were often callbacks to Japanese or American styles, with pixel art aping the NES.
But in 2011, a small independent game studio in Poland picked up a shovel—and dug up the Euro platformer.
And just like that bright red shoe, Oozi was bright. And it hinted at something else that could’ve been discovered, if we’d only kept digging.
I still feel that Oozi is way more significant than people give it credit.
This game came out at a time when indie games were just becoming a thing. Most of it started with Flash games, then shifted to XNA development and Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG)—now defunct, but important. It gave bedroom coders a way to publish on consoles without a middleman.
Now, by 2011, XBLIG was already waning. A lot of it was low-budget throwaway garbage. But Oozi stood out. It proved that the tools still worked—for someone with ambition. Indie could mean quality.
And what Oozi offered was one of the first revivals of the 2D platformer we’ve all come to love—games like Shovel Knight or Owlboy. But Oozi didn’t just revive any 2D platformer.
It revived the Euro platformer.
Everything in Oozi—what made it special—was a callback to C64, Amiga, Genesis, and SNES platformers that defined the Euro platformer. Oozi was bright. Surreal. Unapologetically 2D. And insanely, but rewardingly, difficult.
This wasn’t a roguelike. There was no procedural generation. No gimmicks. No meta-narrative.
It was purely a Euro platformer.
It didn’t try to innovate. It tried to unbury something.
You could see it in the big, expressive sprites. Another hallmark of the genre.
You gotta understand—back in 2011, a lot of indie platformers followed the same script. Ironic. Artsy. Self-aware.
Oozi rejected all that. It was unapologetically light. Nice.
And while it was hard—it wasn’t NES-hard. It was C64-hard. Euro-hard.
Unfortunately, the Euro platformer revival didn’t quite take. But I’ll note this:
The same year Oozi was released, Ubisoft dropped Rayman Origins—the first 2D Rayman game in decades. And a year later, we got Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, a sequel to the classic Giana Sisters for the C64.
For a brief moment—too brief—we had a real Euro platformer revival.
And Oozi might’ve been the most original of them all because it wasn’t based on an older franchise. It was made by a small indie team in Poland.
Oozi later got ported to Steam in 2012—not 2013, as some say—and that’s where I mainly play it now. Two years ago, it got ported to the Nintendo Switch, rebranded as Super Cute Alien’s Adventure.
Not a fan of that name. Kind of generic. But I respect that the dev has stuck with Oozi—and that a new generation can now appreciate it.
I’ll say this much: The devs behind Oozi had a good idea.
The Euro platformer deserves to be unburied. We should experience this style of game again.
Because it was special.
I appreciate you reading!