A new game about Europe: Pathways – Europe at Your Fingertips

Pathways takes players on a virtual exploration tour through Europe. Players meet five protagonists - Lucas, Andreas, Frieda, Magdalena and Yanko - and discover through their perspectives, the advantages and challenges of an open, diverse and tolerant Europe. The plot concerns itself with some of the most important European topics: freedom of expression, freedom of movement, the Bologna Process, the aftermath of the financial crisis in Greece, European institutions in Brussels, (youth) unemployment, the upswing of structurally weak regions, and the current climate policy discourse.

Immersion into a virtual European landscape

Through the eyes of the five protagonists, game players leave the analogue world and step into a virtual map of Europe. With the mobile phone's position sensor, players are teleported to 360-degree views of the five main destinations of the journey - from the busy Gare du Nord in Paris to a research station in the Arctic in Tromso, the old town of Plovdiv, an art exhibition in Athens and to Luxembourg Square in Brussels. Around twenty other places can be visited throughout the journey. Using the latest augmented reality technology and intuitive control via smartphone camera, players experience historical buildings, European capitals of culture and important places of political history, such as Lisbon (the site of the abolition of the death penalty in 1867), the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Gdansk as the starting point of the Solidarnosc (solidarity) movement, the human chain in the Baltic States or Bernauer Strasse, which separated the former East and West Berlin.

Leap from the digital to the physical world

The jump from the digital to the physical world is an essential part of Pathways. Virtual encounters are complemented by personal ones: as the project moves forward, networking workshops of European creatives will take place in cooperation with European experts from the games and digital industries. Further events are planned at the world’s largest gaming expo, Gamescom, in August, as well as in September 2020 at dmexco.

The free-to-use, Europe-wide gaming app is available for immediate download in the App Store and soon for Android devices in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, Greek and Bulgarian. You can find more information at

More information about the cultural programme of the German Presidency of the Council of the European Union can be found here on our site.