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When is an insult not an insult? When it’s affectionate.
‘Friendslop’ would possibly sound dismissive, however speaks of a pervasive cultural fondness for approachable, reasonably priced co-op video games that know methods to keep out of the way in which of a meandering voice chat. ‘Walking simulator’ might have as soon as been used as a cudgel to assault minimalist and meditative experiments in narrative, however has since grow to be a useful label for each the individuals who crave that have and the builders making them. I can sort ‘walking sim’ into my Gmail search bar and discover a number of press releases hoping to promote me on quick, story-led mysteries of 1 form or one other.
In the identical method, ‘eurojank’ is an insult well-meant. On the face of it the time period seems to sentence an entire continent’s video games as laughably buggy and low-budget. But talking as a proud European, who has had the privilege to spend their working life flying to Frankfurt and Ghent and Uppsala to fulfill studios punching above their weight, I can inform you that eurojank—a time period thrown round typically in PC gaming circles within the early 2010s—is a byword for ambition.
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I used to be fortunate sufficient to return of age within the noughties, throughout what you would possibly name eurojank’s first flirtation with the mainstream. It had not too long ago grow to be technically potential to provide 3D worlds that pulled down the partitions and pushed past the horizon, exposing gamers to an undulating topography that advised infinite chance. Morrowind was the polished possibility, when you can consider it; actual heads performed Gothic.
The games industry was on the cusp of inventing the open world shooter, but still a few years away from Far Cry 2. The design language of a whole new genre was up for grabs. These birthing pains created a period of opportunity, in which a bold team of unknowns with a genius engine programmer could catch the attention of the world—then struggle to meet that moment.
Cheeky chancers like GSC Game World would tell the press that NPCs in Stalker: Shadow of Chornobyl might actually beat you to finishing the game. Such promises seemed impossible, and yet impossible to dismiss. After all, the prior decade of technological advancement had transformed PC gaming utterly. Who could say what an FPS might be five years in the future?
Eurojank became a healthy part of my own gaming diet. The Witcher from Poland, with its muddled murder investigations, characters from novels you couldn’t read in English, and dank swamps that rendered the Neverwinter Nights engine unrecognisably moody and majestic.
Boiling Point: Road to Hell from Ukraine—something of a punchline thanks to its floating jaguars, but unparalleled in its respect for player choice. In the fictional South American country of Realia, the first lead on the disappearance of your missing daughter could come from anywhere—the sassy old lady in the street, the editor of the local newspaper, the CIA man everyone pretends not to know is watching the town.
Some of the pillars that supported eurojank have rotted away
Over time these studios either became the new AAA, or faded into the background as companies with more money polished up their best ideas, sanding away the painful edges in the process. Still, eurojank persisted in relative obscurity. Germany in particular remained a holdout for crunchy RPGs, turn-based tactics and point-and-click adventures before Kickstarter made all of those things cool again.
It’s the stubbornness of eurojank companies, their refusal to die, that meant Belgium’s Larian was still around to take advantage of new crowdfunding models in the 2010s.
Today, it’s tempting to believe that eurojank is on top. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is every bit an ancestor of Gothic, while Stalker 2 was embraced as a triumph despite its rusted and abrasive corners. Pathologic 3… exists, which is not something fans of Russian steppe plague theatre ever dared expect 20 years ago.
Look deeper, though, and you’ll see that some of the pillars that supported eurojank have rotted away. French publisher Nacon, which bankrolled a number of eccentric European series in the past decade, filed for insolvency earlier this yr. Now three of its subsidiaries have adopted swimsuit, together with Styx studio Cyanide and Greedfall developer Spiders. A promising Gothic remake is coming, and but the staff who originated the sequence was shut down in 2024—poor Piranha Bytes caught up within the contractions of Embracer Group.
While mid-budget sport improvement won’t ever really go away, it’s turning into far tougher to maintain a staff collectively lengthy sufficient to outline a selected—and maybe peculiar—character for his or her video games. 2024’s completely first rate bayou horror, Alone in the Dark, saw Pieces Interactive torn apart by Embracer after disappointing sales. And a decade and a half of point-and-click adventures wasn’t enough to save Daedalic’s development team from being swallowed up in the aftermath of its final misadventure, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum.
There may also be a secondary reason you don’t hear the term eurojank quite so much anymore: the games got less janky. Powerful and approachable game engines are now cheaply available to any budding developer. Resources like the GDC Vault and blogged postmortems have made it potential for even essentially the most geographically remoted studios to find trade finest practices and apply them to their very own tasks. In 2026, you’re extra prone to affiliate European gamemaking with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a vividly French sport of huge ambition that’s nonetheless sensibly scoped and neatly packaged, than with overreaching hubris.
Then there’s Denmark’s Hitman, Austria’s No Rest for the Wicked, Ukraine’s Metro sequence. The record of slick continental produce goes on.
That change is, in some ways, for the betterment of all: gamers, builders, and journalists, who by no means wish to be duped by pie-in-the-sky guarantees. Still, there’s a much less logical a part of me that misses the feeling of looking for moments of magic amid the damaged code. And even much less defensibly, the wistful high quality of missed potential.
Around the identical time I performed Boiling Point, capturing and bribing my method round a mafia-controlled jungle, I used to be listening to The Libertines—a ramshackle indie band who assembled their soulful and spiky songs like shoddy tradesmen. Their music sounded as if it would crumble at any second, and certainly the group did, proper across the launch of their second album. Almost as thrilling because the noise itself was the concept, if solely they may maintain it collectively, these songs may very well be even higher.
That, to me, will all the time be quintessential eurojank: the perverse pleasure of being burned by proximity to some Icarus-like inventive pressure; a gaggle of unlikely geniuses with a blazingly stunning concept they couldn’t fairly see by means of.
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