REVIEW: Is Arctic Eggs “The weirdest game of 2024”? Techraptor says yes, PGM checked it out

On Monday 5/20/24 we took a look and play of one of the strangest games — Arctic Eggs (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2763670/Arctic_Eggs/ $9.99 regular price) — I’ve played in my 50 years of gaming. Livestreamed for our PGM group, as well.

Based on what I’d read about it in a review and seen, thought this would be a relatively quick in and rejection of this game, maybe with a few laughs along the way, more than likely leading to a Steam refund. The creativity behind the game is what led me to check it out and share with the group. Here’s how Arctic Eggs rolls:

Play as an egg chef in Antarctica, cooking eggs with a wide range of bizarre ingredients like, cough (snicker) cigarettes, sardine cans with sardines cooked (yes, together), bottles and more.

Literally everyone in Arctic Eggs is a freak. You’ve got people spouting the most random string of words, like this one girl comparing cooking to cleaning toilets, or how they used to use my character’s nose as a sundial when the power was out. Then in comes folks spouting deep philosophical truths, and I’m just like, “Man, I am not prepared for this.”

The Weirdest Game of 2024 Just Dropped on Steam with Arctic Eggs (techraptor.net)

Copious humor to brighten up darkened gaming days. Who doesn’t need some of this? Especially on a Monday, the worst day of the week (unless that’s your day off, of course).

Over an hour later, I was still playing it — and kinda digging it. You see, it’s got more meat on the bones than a basic cooking sim, although at it’s core that is the game: cooking bizarre recipes from weird people often spouting lines of strange dialogue. You need to find the hungry people, which is not every person you click on, then cook whatever they want in a frying pan being sure not to let anything fall out of the frying pan. The eggs and other items often need to be flipped in the pan, which is done with a flick of the right thumbstick. This is much easier said than done, adding the challenge of the game. Thin ingredients like cigarettes really jump high and wide out of the pan when flipping even slightly too hard.

After beating the first level on the stream in about an hour, which tasked me with cooking for 9 hungry people, you go down a bright hall and enter the second level. The game crashed at this point leaving me thinking it didn’t save, but when loading on the same PC there was an autosave at 29% complete. Unfortunately, there is no cloud as of this writing, so if you try and play it on another PC or Steam Deck, you’ll have to start from the beginning. Only local save is a miss, Steam Cloud save really is important for games like this.

Decided not to refund this, because enjoyed the creativity and the 70s groove music background, but will admit this game is more than a bit thin. At $9.99, the regular price, there doesn’t appear to be 10 hours of gameplay. In fact, reading through the Steam reviews, some gamers are saying they beat the entire game in three hours. That would be about in line with the pace I was playing. This game should be priced closer or under $3. It’s also single player, no multiplayer modes, no leaderboards. Yes, more modes, more depth needed for $9.99 (in fairness, I bought at 30% off near launch from Steam).

On May 21, the developer added a sandbox mode, perhaps sensing there needs to be more content in this game for the price.

Another suggestion to the dev: add some kind of leaderboard. Perhaps tracking the time played. Fastest to cook. Maybe allow sharing strange ingredients cooked and fastest times. This game begs to have more than what it is.

That all said, can’t recommend it at the regular price, but would recommend checking it out when/if the price drops around $3 USD and/or if you can buy it somewhere for that price, or more is added to the game. Unfortunately, Steam doesn’t allow anything other than thumbs up or down, so I’m trying to decide whether to give this a thumbs up (recommended) or thumbs down (not recommended). Purely based on the creativity and fun factor, as flipping the stuff in the pan is more fun than it probably should be, I’m leaning recommended, however the price is too much for what’s there. Argh. Let me know in the comments which way you would lean. Have to mull this over more and will be linking here to this article and saying in my review that it’s too thin gameplay-wise for the regular price and needs more to do, and more to compete against (timed leaderboards, for example) for more replayability. The Sandbox helps, but if multiplayer is added, leaderboards, more modes — and, yes, sandbox helps — hey, this could go somewhere.

Despite the amount of content to play and enjoy, Steam reviews overall are at the time of this writing the best rating, with 612 reviews averaging “Overwhelming Positive.” Gamers like creativity, and this game’s eggs have it more than just sprinkled here and there.

To answer the headline of this article? It’s definitely the “weirdest game” this author has played in 2024 to date, but as of this writing the year isn’t over. It gets lots of points for creativity, because while there are plenty of cooking sims, this is different enough from many(?) of those, but it might be too out there to go viral.

Then again, this is 2024, when many games stay safe, are boring instead of showing much or any creativity, take too long to make and publish (enough of living forever in “early access” already), and cost way too much. $10 might be the price point where people say “let me give it a try.” $10 worked for Lethal Company (see: Lethal Company horror game launched October 2023 has 71,000+ Overwhelmingly Positive Steam Reviews).