Smashing an Egg. That’s It, That's the Game

Is cracking a giant egg open the new Call of Duty? No, but Crack is further proof new Steam indie games are currently operating on a creative plane the rest of us can only hope to understand. It's a co-op game featuring an enormous egg in a laboratory. Nobody knows where it came from. Nobody knows what’s inside it. You've got a pickaxe and instructions to smash it open.

Things get more complicated from there. Crack promises an “incremental adventure,” meaning you don’t just stand around whacking the world’s largest omelette precursor with said pickaxe until something interesting happens.

You begin with relatively sensible egg-cracking equipment like pickaxes and chisels before progressing to dynamite and, apparently, “other weird tools” scattered around the mysterious laboratory. You can build scaffolding, and there are secret rooms, and any broken shells can be turned into currency. Most ominously, according to the press release for the game, "The egg has secrets," and, "The egg reacts to you. Whatever you do to it, it responds."

Honestly, it's a lot of pressure on whatever is inside that egg. Let's all take a moment to reflect on the sad tale of Peter Molyneux's Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube? Which promised the person that got to its core a life-changing prize. That prize turned out to be a revenue share in Molyneux's game Godus, which, at least by 2017, hadn't made a profit, and so there was zero revenue to share.

Crack is just the latest wonderfully specific game that Steam seems uniquely capable of promoting: Somebody has one deeply silly idea, refuses to dilute it with anything resembling good sense, and somehow ends up making the premise more compelling by taking it completely seriously. It feels like we're currently in a golden age for weird ways to burn time; there's a game called Needle In A Haystack Simulator where, well, you can figure out the main mechanic, and tidying up games are keeping people (and by people, I mean me) entranced by shelf stacking. Sadly, I've yet to find a game solely dedicated to peeling the labels off beer bottles in dive bars.

Crack will be released on Steam on October 26, and you can wishlist it here.