I stumbled into Egg in 4 great games you can finish in one sitting on mothership.blog. Spoiler: I did not finish it in one sitting (more on that in a second), but I did fall in love with it! Go download it (or fire it up in your browser) and try jumping around! It feels good.
I was thinking about how I didn’t finish Egg in one sitting, despite Zoë Hannah writing on Mothership that “you can crush in a few hours.” I was having a fantastic time, but my attention wandered, despite the fact that I was playing a video game! I read Cal Newport’s newsletter Film Students Can No Longer Sit Through Films recently, and I was thinking about it as I was playing Egg.
Two minutes into playing Egg I felt the pull of “I need to hop on Discord and say something cute about how Egg is my new favorite Souls-like”. I decided I would try to finish the game before telling anyone (other than my spouse) about it. I did immediately shout “come feel how good the egg jumps!” but that felt very important.
…time passes…
86 days later, I have beaten Egg! I think my total playtime probably was on the upper end of “a few hours” but spread over a dozen short sessions. I immediately hopped on Discord to tell people about it. I had actually forgotten I was trying to resist that impulse earlier until I opened up the draft of this blog post. Regardless, it’s a delightful game! A wonderful study in how sometimes a game has the juice and its hard to say why. I don’t particularly like platformers, and I’m definitely not particularly good at them, but I loved Egg! Is it just because the sound you make when you jump is extremely satisfying? Maybe. It was a perfect level of difficulty for me where I found it quite challenging, but I was able to beat the game without having to look anything up (I’m not even sure if there is even anything out there I could have looked up).
Using guides is always a challenge for me. I recently read The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola and their exploration of different types of rules helped me better articulate how I sometimes get myself into trouble by creating an internal rule for myself like “don’t look things up in a guide” and then end up looking something up without deciding for myself that I have changed that internal rule, and then I feel like I have “cheated” despite the fact that I’m the one who made up the rules. As I’ve become more aware of how I can rob myself of my own fun by pulling this bait and switch, I’ve become more generous with myself about sculpting my internal rules about how I approach a particular game to be more about having fun, and less about making myself feel guilty. Expect another post in approximately 2030 when I beat Baba is You and can talk about how wonderful Baba is Hint is!
But back to Egg. Doing hard things for entertainment (even “hard” in the sense of a difficult game) feels good in a way that is extremely satisfying for me. I’d like to do more of this. I think I’m due to reread The Art of Failure by Jesper Juul. Egg is a lovely study in the art of failure.
I am charmed and delighted by the meandering journey this very small game has taken me on (as evidenced by this meandering blog post). How does “you’re an egg that jumps” yield this much introspection!?
Go play Egg! What does it make you think about?