Wait, That Egg Game is Evil, Actually

By Elijah Gonzalez | November 3, 2025 | 10:11am

Video Games Reviews Terry Cavanagh

Last week, we published an article about Terry Cavanagh’s new 3D platformer, Egg, a game that, as the title suggests, is about playing as an egg. In the post, I characterized it as a breezy, whimsical time, even if it offered some signs of resistance.

However, having now played the game to credits, I’d like to offer a redaction and a firm apology for neglecting my journalistic due diligence: it turns out that Egg is a little bit evil. I don’t say that as a slight against the game, but to signal what kind of experience it is. To put it succinctly, it’s got shades of Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy, combined with a surprisingly cryptic structure. In short, it’s kind of diabolical.

To back up a bit and explain the game for those who aren’t caught up, last Thursday acclaimed game designer Terry Cavanagh (Super Hexagon, VVVVVV, Dicey Dungeons) unexpectedly uploaded a new game on Itch.io, called Egg. It’s a freeware title that runs in browsers via HTML5. Its tags are the following: 3D Platformer, egg, and Godot (a free and open source game engine).

On the surface, everything about the game seems innocent enough. Things begin as your egg awakens from its slumber, bouncing out of a carton inexplicably placed on a precarious cliffside. The world is pixelated and covered in a lo-fi sheen reminiscent of early polygonal games. It’s very inviting, and for anyone with fond memories of character platformers from that era, it’s hard to ignore this call to eggy adventure.

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Adding to its pick-up-and-play qualities, the controls are quite simple: use the arrow keys (or joystick on the controller) to move and hold the space bar to charge a jump. As you charge, there’s a little notching sound that plays up to three times, indicating the strength of your incoming leap. Basically, your jump is set to four possible distances: a little hop, a solid jump, a big leap, and a downright launch. On top of this, unlike most contemporary platformers, there is no air movement, and once you’ve picked the direction you’re facing and the charge level of your jump, you’re locked into that trajectory.

Up front, the retro aesthetic and straightforward control scheme convey a central simplicity and sense of lighthearted fun. The world is bright, and you leap between grassy outcroppings. Sure, your egg will occasionally take a spill into the abyss, but the checkpoints are so plentiful that there’s hardly any progress lost.

But then things start to get hard. At one point, as I missed a jump and fell into an unexpected cavern, I found a chasm that could only be navigated by jumping onto moving blocks. As previously mentioned, you don’t have any real aerial control once you’ve left the ground, meaning it’s quite hard to land on a moving target; unfortunately, to get across, you need to do so multiple times. Cue my egg falling into a pit dozens of times.

That said, after numerous failed attempts, I finally managed to get across, at which point the objective of the game revealed itself. As I shuffled towards a glowing pillar of light, my oval-shaped companion suddenly snapped into place next to a collection of frog eggs left on the ocean floor. “nest discovered” the text reads as the camera circles triumphantly.

Then, when I hit a button to move on from this animation, I’m suddenly back at the start of the game, but something’s changed. Now I’m a different egg. The spot where the previous egg was is vacant, implying that to “win” Egg you need to navigate each of these little dudes to a new home. This is where I left off in my previous article, and this is when the real challenge began.

Because for the next egg, I took the most straightforward path, which eventually leads to an escalating gauntlet of nightmare challenges designed to torment you. Again, it starts out simple enough—jump up the spokes of a slowly spinning turbine. But then things become more and more sadistic. At one point, you need to navigate between two waterfalls of lava as you hop between moving pistons that drag you into the inferno if you’re not careful. Later, you have to leap between the narrow metal bars of a grate.

And then in basically every case, after you let out a sigh of relief, you need to do it again, but harder: the grate gains a spinning death blade, and the spinning pistons move quickly and in opposite directions, with a single mistake sending you all the way back to the bottom with a dull thud—again, this is where the Jump King or Getting Over It comparisons come into play.

However, it should be noted that while this makes the game sound entirely unpleasant, this isn’t the case. There is a brutal honesty to it all that stems from the previously mentioned central simplicity. With only four jump lengths and no aerial movement, each area becomes a challenge in figuring out how you can use your limited moveset to traverse these trials.

Do none of the jumps seem to fit? Try launching yourself at an angle instead of in a straight path. If there’s a wall, you can bounce off it to get up awkward mantles. While most of these obstacles feel impossible to scale at first, it’s deeply satisfying to finally crack the best way to clear them. While not quite as unforgiving as Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy, Egg shares the satisfaction in forcing you to overcome imposing trials with a rudimentary control scheme.

And then, there’s one other way that the game is difficult, and similarly gratifying: actually finding these platforming arenas is its own challenge. While the two previously described paths are relatively easy to locate, the rest are very much hidden, requiring you to pay close attention to your surroundings and have faith in this egg’s ability to catapult itself absurd distances. In the end, finding each of these hidden routes proves equally rewarding as clearing them.

Egg is a bit of a bait and switch: it begins as a charming, sunny platformer, before it hoodwinks you with some truly brutal turns that will result in a whole bunch of exposed egg yokes. Thankfully, though, it handles this shift extremely well, and as unyielding as it may be, these difficulty spikes are fair and earned. Especially for a free game that shadow dropped on a random Thursday, Egg feels fully cooked.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.