There are few things in the world that translate fragility as immediately as an egg. While it’s often because the first time someone picks up an egg ends in sticky yellow palms polka dotted with egg shell flakes, it’s also because you can immediately tell an egg is holding something. There is weight to an egg that makes every crack louder, any fall spectacular, and all things born from them that much more precious — even when they’re not cute chickens. So, it only makes sense that a game called egg, that features some pretty raw platforming, embodies the most captivating part of any egg not meant for a frying pan: hatching. 

Available on itch.io for free, the platformer Egg from Terry Cavanagh plays with attributes of its namesakes in both explicit and subtle ways before it even gets to hatching. In terms of the former, the first thing that greets the player on screen is a literal egg. Immediately after, players are met with a gap between where the egg is and where the game, wordlessly, encourages it to go. Most people know what happens to any egg unlucky enough to travel the distance between their hands and a floor, and can presumably understand things don’t get much luckier when the distance is the height of a cliff, so these introductory scenes create an immediate tension. The game wastes no time in reminding players that eggs have fragile weight.

This weight is also translated by how players move around. What’s interesting about jumping in Egg is that while there’s freedom in how big a jump the egg can make — there are four different ways that range from a small hop to launching the sucker — there is no way to change trajectory once it’s in the air. There’s no saving the thing once you’ve let it go. You simply have to trust that you’ve measured the gap correctly, caught a strong grasp of your jumping ability, and will land safely. And when the egg eventually, inevitably, doesn’t land safely, scrambled across whatever floor was just far enough to be considered lethal, the fullness of its weight bears down upon the player as they reset at the game’s fairly generous checkpoints. 

It’s once I spent some time with this weight that the hatching started to occur. When I brought the first egg to one of six nests in Egg, I had thought of hatching personally. Despite five more eggs waiting to find a home in some truly surprising spots in the world, my early moments in the game felt like growing the way I’ve seen an egg hatch: full of breaking. While I wouldn’t call Egg a hard game, especially if you’re well-versed in platformers generally, it is one that requires a lot of trial and error. There’s some learning involved with any game, but the process feels especially intimate here when every tool at your disposal is in your hands from the get-go and it’s more a matter of becoming familiar with them. Growing that familiarity with one spilled yolk after another felt like breaking out of a shell in its own right, one that funnily enough ended with my egg’s shell intact and nestled into a comfortable home.

However, as I brought more eggs to their new homes underwater, on top of a crane, and other odd spaces, I realized that another thing had been hatching progressively: the game itself. This idea started fermenting when music first pleased my ears. It’s not that the soundtrack of public domain songs was especially standout (even though I think it has a hypnotic effect that assists in encouraging a ‘try again’ attitude), but rather that the game did not start with music. There’s an evident intention as to when music does and doesn’t play, frequently correlating to your progress toward a specific nest. And when I say progress, it doesn’t mean that the music only plays once you’ve tortured yourself long enough to get the egg in a nest — that would make the music feel more like a pure reward — but rather that the beats will play so long as you’re trying to progress. It’s a small but important difference that not only makes the game more enjoyable, but also cements its approach to growth as a more realistic slow and unsteady ascent rather than a stark 0 to full-hatched being.

With all that said, while the music started the idea of Egg hatching itself, what confirmed it of all things were some tree branches hanging off the side of the cliff. I thought nothing of these branches the first time I saw them. Then, when I started my second egg run, a suspicion started growing that these branches might not just be set dressing. It wasn’t until I was on my third egg that I decided to take the leap of faith toward them, fully prepared to experience an ‘egg on my face’ moment, that my suspicion turned into fact: I could jump on these branches! I cannot overstate how good I felt when I landed right on the edge of a protruding twig. It was more than feeling accomplished after making a rather dangerous jump. It was realizing I had experienced a hiding-in-plain-sight trick that completely reoriented my thinking of the game. It opened up so much in an instant while simultaneously not changing anything at all. 

That moment with the tree branches is when the game hatched for me, or at least became most explicit in its hatching, as well as where I felt my abilities hatched too. While that leap was a realization of how expansive Egg actually is, it was also a test of my confidence. I couldn’t have made that leap during the first or second egg runs not just because of doubt the game allowed it, but also some level of insecurity in my abilities. I cracked a lot of eggs before launching one at those branches. And it was necessary to lose all those eggs if I was ever going to have a chance at seeing what Cavanagh’s game held for me. It was necessary if both the game and I wanted to truly hatch.