Summary
How do you like your eggs in the morning? I take mine fried, or as you Americans call it, sunny side up. I have a general dislike for Americanisms due to my inherent Britishness and a love of the English language that you all seem to flaunt with every phrase and pronunciation, but sunny side up sounds cute so I’ll allow it.
Whether you call it fried, sunny side up, or prefer them poached (acceptable) or scrambled (weirdo), I bet you’ve never had your eggs with a cigarette. No, not eaten some eggs and then smoked a cigarette. Cooked a cigarette in the pan with your egg. If you’ve never tried this, you’ve clearly never playedArctic Eggs.
Arctic Eggs is stylised like a game from two decades ago, its unsettling lo-fi aesthetic ripped in equal parts from aPlayStationlaunch title and that recurring nightmare that you can’t escape. That’s not to say it’s a scary game – you’re just cooking eggs in the arctic, after all – but everything about its presentation is unsettling.
This translates to the narrative, too. While there’s no real story as such, the NPCs you cook for will reference government conspiracy, while the rows of battery chickens who watch you cook their bounties from their tiny cages constantly unnerve.
“It’s all intended to make you feel a little uncomfortable when, in reality, all you’re doing is cooking eggs.”
As you might expect from a game with this aesthetic, the gameplay is no Cooking Mama. You grasp your frying pan in your mouse hand, and move it left and right to control the flip. I’ve never played a game that uses physics-based controls mapped to your mouse movements quite like this before, and the result is, again, unsettling.
It’s difficult to get the hang of, but soon you’re cooking all manner of weird eats, combinations that even Anthony Bourdain would refuse. Flipping the eggs requires a deft touch – the mouse is almost used like a Wii remote – but when there are other items in the pan too? It’s chaotic and brilliant, technically difficult while conceptually so simple.
You’re not used to controlling a pan’s movements with your mouse like this, so the controls feeloff. It’s all a part of the game’s subversion of the mechanics we’re used to, it’s all intended to make you feel a little uncomfortable when, in reality, all you’re doing is cooking eggs. And cigarettes.
The addition of cigarettes to a meal is more than just a quirky ‘ooh look we eat biftas here’. The cigarettes are lit the moment they touch the hot steel of your pan and act as a timer for your challenge. The NPC asked for eggs and a cigarette, not eggs and a burned filter.
Arctic Eggs is a game built around a simple premise, but a new one. I’ve never played a game I can compare to it, mechanically speaking, and the addition of a strong and unsettling (there it is again) art style makes it all the more engaging.
Arctic Eggs is available onItch.io, but itsSteamdescription grabbed my attention. Where developers usually use the space to wax lyrical about everything their game has to offer, referencing review scores and fan observations, hitting any number of mechanical buzzwords to try to get players to part with their cash, Arctic Eggs has two sentences.
“A Sci-Fi Cooking game where you take up the role of a Poultry Peddler stuck in Antarctica and longing for a way out. Cook your illegal eggs for those who look hungry.”
