Egging On

One fragile egg, a hen-house, and a long climb toward freedom

Egging On is the debut release from developer Egobounds, published by Alibi Games and IndieArk, released 6 November 2025 for Windows. The premise is simple and deliberately absurd: players control a single egg attempting to escape a hen-house, rolling, jumping and climbing its way upward through a farm shop, a mechanical factory and other increasingly hostile environments in pursuit of freedom. The egg has no arms, no conventional platforming tools, and controls with a loose, wobbling physicality that immediately places Egging On in the lineage of "rage games" like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, where the central challenge is learning to read and trust an intentionally unpredictable movement system rather than executing familiar, precise platforming inputs. Multiple difficulty options are available, including an easier mode with regular checkpoints and a harder, checkpoint-free mode the game itself names after its own title.

Sound design, art direction and the satisfaction of mastery

The single most consistent thread running through Egging On's review corpus is enthusiasm for how polished the experience feels underneath its brutal difficulty. Reviewers repeatedly and specifically praise the game's sound design, with one detailed review singling out how the egg produces genuinely distinct audio cues rolling across glass versus metal surfaces, a level of detail that reviewer says goes largely unnoticed specifically because it feels so intuitive. Art direction draws its own repeated, specific credit, with reviewers describing a visual identity across the hen-house, farm shop and factory settings that several explicitly argue is more polished than other games in the genre it's most often compared to. The core physics-based movement system draws genuine, hard-won enthusiasm once mastered: one detailed review, describing 43 hours with the game including a full clear on its hardest difficulty, traces a specific arc from believing certain sections were "mathematically impossible" to eventually beating them cleanly once panic gave way to pattern recognition, framing that shift in mindset as the game's real reward. A collectible-hunting layer, with dozens of unlockable eggs and hidden stamps scattered throughout the climb, draws specific praise for extending the game well past a single playthrough for completionist-minded players.

Optimisation, checkpoints and a punishing final stretch

Set against that praise, Egging On's review base raises specific, detailed complaints about exactly where its difficulty tips from rewarding into simply frustrating. The most consistently repeated technical criticism concerns optimisation: multiple reviewers describe crashes and system overheating tied to level loading, particularly during long falls or when using the game's "drone" feature to reset back to a previous height, with one detailed review specifically asking for additional checkpoints to reduce how much of the level needs to reload at once. A related, heavily repeated complaint concerns the main mode's checkpoint structure itself, with reviewers describing a single late mistake sending them all the way back to the very beginning of a run rather than to a more recent, reasonable point, a design several reviewers argue crosses from difficult into punitive. A further, independently repeated complaint describes uneven pacing in the game's later stages, with one detailed review, who had participated in the game's beta test and written an early stamp guide, specifically arguing the final level introduces several new mechanics at once without the gradual practice earlier sections provide, calling it "a stupid design for trying to make a game harder without using the tools you already built up."

A narrator, a readability problem, and a genre that thrives on love-hate reactions

A smaller but specific and repeated thread of complaints concerns Egging On's narrator, whose calm, ironic commentary on the player's repeated failures draws a genuinely divided reaction: reviewers who dislike it describe the tone as grating or overly familiar, arguing the trend of rage games pairing brutal difficulty with a detached, wry narrator has become tiresome, while others don't mention it as a negative at all. A further, more technical complaint concerns visual clarity around the egg's climbable "tip," with reviewers describing difficulty judging exactly where that point is positioned relative to a ledge, leading to failed grabs that read as a readability problem rather than a fair test of skill. Notably, Egging On's review corpus also contains an unusually large number of reviews that recommend the game while simultaneously expressing genuine frustration with it, one reviewer's summary, "great game. but I still hate you none the less," captures a dynamic that recurs across dozens of otherwise positive reviews, suggesting the game's difficulty is working as intended for much of its audience even when that audience is actively furious while playing it.

Value

At NZ$21.99, Egging On sits at a reasonable price for a genre where difficulty itself is the primary selling point, and most of its review base considers the game's sound design, art direction and distinctive central mechanic a fair trade for a challenge some reviewers compare, only half jokingly, unfavourably to Elden Ring for sheer difficulty. The Mostly Positive score, 641 positive against 207 negative across 848 reviews, reflects a review base genuinely split between players won over by the satisfaction of mastering the egg's wobble physics and a detailed minority whose specific complaints about optimisation, checkpoint punishment and late-game pacing are worth weighing seriously before buying. For fans of rage platformers and precision physics games looking for a genuinely difficult, distinctive new entry in the genre, Egging On is worth a look, provided buyers go in with realistic expectations about both the difficulty and its rougher technical edges.