Once upon a time, the great graven cave troll Terry Cavanagh rose from his slumbers, scratched the opals from his beard of woven copper, and said to himself: “Today I will make a 3D egg platform game in which a 3D egg goes platforming, like my hit game VVVVVV, but 3D and with eggs.” And because there was no-one around to say “WTF, Terry” or “perhaps you are just hungry” or “Mr Cavanagh, the egg’s paucity of external appendages and senses wholly disallow it as a means of self-directed locomotion”, that is exactly what he did.
We are all the richer for it, because Egg (subtitle “why not be an egg”) is eggcellent. It’s also free and playable right now in a browser on Itch.io.
Where Cavanagh’s early influences include Final Fantasy 7, in which there’s a chapter that has you defending a giant condor egg against Shinra, I happen to be a graduate of Sonic the Hedgehog University, which teaches that eggs are the work of Satanic industrialists. As such, I was profoundly suspicious of the egg platformer concept, but there is ample precedent: the Dizzy series (in which the egg has hands and feet), the shellshocked and yolk-crazed Billy the Hatcher, and the recent physics-me-do Egging On. Sometimes when Sonic curls into a ball, I think that he looks rather like an egg. But then I close my eyes and bang my temples until the demons go away.
Cavanagh’s Egg is both familiar of structure and tonally eggcentric. It puts you in charge of a supermarket box of six eggs, perched on a cliffside. Your job – I think, based on about 30 minutes with the game – is to control and guide the eggs one by one to a nest, somewhere in the landscape. It’s possible there’s a moral here about industrial poultry farming, but I don’t want to bust out the Carol Adams just yet. I’ve succeggsfully guided just one egg to a “nest” so far. It slumbers now in a clump of frogspawn on a sandbank, deep underwater.
The world is a stark, pixellated, precarious and arbitrary yet somehow consoling expanse of ledges and moving platforms and tunnels and whirling machinery, divided into discreet biomes that are linked by warp pipes. You move with WASD, look with the mouse, and jump with space, holding down the bar to charge up higher jumps.
It’s a little fiddly, with lots of deadly drops, but not that punishing: checkpoints are plentiful, and you have infinite lives. Also, when you slide down a slope to a messy doom your egg makes a charmingly wibbly ooh-er noise. I think the eggs are all voiced by Cavanagh himself. Pretty sure Hideo Kojima has never voiced an egg.
Who can explain the scrambled imaginings of the great graven cave troll Terry Cavanagh? It’s possible this blog post might shed some light. Do a battery hen factory sim next, Terry.
