I’ve played a lot of Early Access games on their launch days. Eternity Egg just dropped and, due to my love of both madcap zaniness and 3D platformers, it shot right up my must-play list. The game is incredibly unique, has a very specific vision, and has some really addictive mechanics, but it’s also quite buggy, in addition to constantly going out of its way to give its players a baffling, poorly considered experience.
I have no idea what’s happening at any time in Eternity Egg. You’re some kind of jester thing that finds a bell staff that has some kind of clown living inside of it, and some monster breaks the sky like glass and shows up. That’s all I know. The world is untextured in an obvious throwback to Bubsy 3D of all things. It’s a patently insane game that would probably best be enjoyed while listening to Mr. Bungle’s self-titled album while your parents scream at each other in the living room. In other words, I really dig the presentation here. I’ve been steadily growing more insane for years, and it’s always nice to play a game that seems to match my madness.
Eternity Egg opens with an FMV before dropping you into its first level. Once you start, there is zero tutorial of any sort, which is a shame, because I can’t imagine a 3D platformer more desperately in need of some sort of guidance than this. Your character can use their staff to bounce, but pressing another button after descending on your bounce (not before) will cause them to bounce higher, but this can only be done once per bounce. You can roll and then do a jump out of it for extra distance. There’s also a move that’ll fling you forward when pressed, with more air being covered if you hold it.
Naturally, you attack with your staff and can block too. Attacking in the air will also fling you forward, just like the other move, plus you can hold this one too to go further once again. They both behave very similarly and represent some very unclear design. Your most necessary move, however, is the wall run, which you can only activate after using the mid-air attack and not the other fling move. The game does literally nothing to let you know you can do this. I saw a streamer slam his head against the game for the better part of an hour because he didn’t know he could do it.
Oddly, Eternity Egg is based around a stamina system. Everything other than your bounces uses stamina, and your bounces are the only way to recover it quickly. While this is an odd choice, it’s necessary because, without some sort of limits, you’d be able to basically fly across the level and wall run infinitely, but it still feels really weird in a 3D platformer. The wall run is kind of awkward to use, and you can’t change direction while using it. The combat is poor and based around spamming staff attacks while enemies walk up and damage you. Also, there are corpse runs for some godforsaken reason.
You have two types of currency, one you get from pots, and energy you get from defeating enemies or specific checkered pots. Dying will drop your energy, requiring you to return to where you died. Falling into pits counts as deaths, and sometimes you won’t be able to get your energy back. There’s a fairly difficult section in the very first level that requires you to platform over massive pits, so good luck keeping your energy intact. While the platforming in Eternity Egg does feel quite nice at times, it can also feel incredibly difficult to control. Most of your moves send you flying at high speed and cover a ton of ground, making this section feel like an absolute pain. It’s truly hard to be precise.
It doesn’t appear that there are any checkpoints, so dying will see you return to the start of the level. At one point after making it past the hard platforming section, I hit an enemy with a charged attack in mid-air and then went flying off into a pit afterward, requiring me to do the whole thing again. There’s no good reason for this. But the real biggest problem here is the bugs. There are gates that block your progress at certain points. Walking into them can get you stuck, which also breaks the menu, forcing you to quit the game.
You can bounce right through the floor and die, leaving you with no way to get your energy back. You can literally get stuck on a wall when attempting to wall run, also necessitating a force quit. I also seemingly ran into a bug where all of my energy just vanished for no reason. I’d kill an enemy, grab the energy, then see that my energy reads as 0 just moments later. It’s kind of astounding that anyone thought that this was ready for release in any capacity.
Signposting in levels can also be quite poor, as it’s not uncommon to not know how to proceed. Simply put, Eternity Egg is very interesting but an absolute mess. Considering that an update has already broken the saves of many with zero warning and that the menu can mess up on controllers when starting the game, switching to the file overwrite option, there are still more roadblocks stifling player enjoyment. Eternity Egg is absolutely not worth it in its current state, and buying it is not advisable. Depending on whether the dev is actually interested in making an enjoyable game, I think it could really be remarkable, but I’m definitely going to be waiting until full release to play it again.
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