Crack Is a Co-op Game About Smashing a Giant Mysterious Egg

Crack is an upcoming Steam indie game with exactly one premise: there's an enormous egg in a laboratory, nobody knows where it came from or what's inside it, and your job is to smash it open. It launches on Steam on October 26.

The game is co-op and bills itself as an "incremental adventure" — so you're not just endlessly swinging a pickaxe at the world's largest potential omelette. You start with sensible tools like pickaxes and chisels, then work your way up to dynamite and, according to the press release, "other weird tools" scattered around the lab. You can build scaffolding, discover secret rooms, and convert broken shell fragments into currency. The egg itself is apparently reactive — the developers say it "responds" to whatever you do to it, and that it has secrets. No pressure.

Crack fits neatly into a current Steam micro-genre of games built around one deeply committed, deeply silly idea. The platform has become unusually good at surfacing these: Needle In A Haystack Simulator does exactly what it sounds like, and a wave of tidying and shelf-stacking games has quietly eaten hours of people's lives. The formula is consistent — take one absurd premise, refuse to dilute it, play it completely straight, and somehow make it more compelling for it. The egg-cracking concept also carries faint echoes of Peter Molyneux's Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?, a 2012 experiment that promised the player who reached its core a life-changing prize. That prize turned out to be a revenue share in Molyneux's game Godus — which, as of 2017, had yet to turn a profit, making the reward worth exactly nothing.

Crack hits Steam on October 26. If a giant mysterious egg reacting to your pickaxe sounds like your kind of evening, the wishlist page is already live.