PlayStation Basement #86 - Egg

This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on April 18th, 2020.

Another week, another PlayStation Basement! PlayStation Basement is a weekly review of games for the original PlayStation that are somewhat obscure, unusual, or unknown. Games are rated Good, Bad, or Neutral to emphasize the review itself. Now, let’s go!

Sunday was Easter, a religious holiday for Christians that incorporates eggs in a somewhat secular manner recalling spring festivals of ancient Germanic tribes. Today, I have a perfect game for such a holiday: Egg. Egg, also known as Bunmei Korokoro Game – Egg (Civilization Rolling Game – Egg) was released in Japan in February of 1998 from Toshiba EMI and developed by Beyond Interactive. It is a strategy/puzzle/city-building god-game in which the player controls a cosmic egg that rolls over empty fields to construct cities. I’m not kidding either.

The cover art to Egg is like a prog-rock image. It shows a floating egg, the title written on a waving scroll, and a background like an old notebook. I was impressed with how the covers and insides of the manual make this look like an old book that you might find in the back of an antique shop. Some pages have dog-eared corners, wrinkles, or stickers printed on the page. I actually thought the ripped off price sticker printed on the back was a real sticker! Looking at the cover art doesn’t exactly make this game easy to decipher, though I’m sure the back describes something about it for those more fluent in Japanese. The mystery of Egg begins.

Egg is a 2D game with unique designs. There are four colored eggs to play as or compete against in Egg: red, blue, green, and yellow. Each egg has different architectural styles that accompany it. Though some look kind of like feudal Japan or ancient Egypt, all of the styles include some kind of weird elements like bouncing or spinning buildings. Some of the styles look like futuristic utopias. These buildings look pretty good, but their animation is lacking. Some seem to have two frames for animations that really need three or four. It makes some of these weird spinning buildings look really choppy. The eggs and the worlds they inhabit look nice. I like the smooth gradient of the eggs, and the weird scrolling backgrounds behind the map. If the animations weren’t so scrambled this would be an eggcelent looking game.

The sound of Egg is very clever and contributes to the mysterious nature of Egg. Sound effects are limited to crashing and selection sounds. They are good sound effects though. The sound used for aiming the egg each turn has a great cymbal sound, and the sound of the egg roll is nice and deep. The musick is really weird. Combining found sounds, classical motifs from different places in Asia, and eerie ambience, Egg’s soundtrack is akin to something that might be called vaporwave today. Very oddly, the musick tends to loop almost erratically; it doesn’t seem to be consistent, and small clips may appear or disappear in the musick track as the game goes on. It seems that the musick may change depending on what is happening in the game, but this is my own conjecture at work here. Still, the mystery of the egg never ceases to amaze me.

When you play Egg, the mystery may continue. I was a little confused when I first played the game with my girlfriend and her friend last year. It’s still kind of confusing. The basics are simple. The game is played in turns and is sort of like playing pool. You select an ability, aim the egg by pointing it in a direction, and then press a button to stop the power meter when it is where you want it to be. The egg moves in that direction, slightly curving to one side. For most of the game you will be selecting the first ability which creates cities as the egg travels. If you create a circle or similar enclosed shape with your movements, the area within the enclosed shape will fill in and also create a tower that controls your egg’s power. The city-building ability also destroys your opponents’ cities if it travels over them. Don’t let your tower get destroyed or you lose. As you create more cities, the egg gains more abilities such as the power to create a tidal wave to destroy things around it or the power to create earthquakes as it travels to damage larger buildings. The egg can also create walls out of areas you already control to bounce the opponent back. If an egg runs into a wall or rolls into an opposing egg, the egg will crack a bit. It will also develop cracks as it rolls around. Cracks can be healed by rolling over your own areas, and sometimes, though I’m not sure when, the egg will get sealed by a big barrier that heals it and protects it until the next turn. Rolling over your own area, or perhaps just expanding the already existing area with new cities that connect, seems to power up the already existing buildings. This is when they become those spinning automatons and the like. I wish I had a better understanding of this game, so I really knew what was going on.

Egg is especially a problem for those who can’t read much Japanese when playing Mission Mode. I was able to find some information online but not much. For the first mission, I had to take over at least 30% of the map. I couldn’t figure out the second mission, though I think the objective might be to crack the enemy egg until it shatters. The short review I read said that I would need to destroy the enemy’s egg in both missions but doing so in the first mission actually caused me to fail. If you are not fluent in Japanese, you will probably also have trouble understanding Egg, though the Versus Mode is very doable for those who know the basics. This mode is fun to play with up to three other players, destroying each other’s eggs and creating cities. It’s fun to see how the cities grow and hear the weird musick. I wish I could read more in the Mission Mode to really play that.

Egg is a very unique game. It’s a bit slow and not amazingly intuitive, but the uniqueness from inside the egg is a truly original sight. My friend Tyler saw the egg in his dreams of eBay, and I bought it. It has been a very odd and treasured game in my collection ever since. Egg is a true mystery. Just what is hiding in that cosmic shell?

Egg receives a Good.

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