Eggs are a common element of video games, so common as to transcend the easy punch lines. They're an origin of life, a resource, a fuel. They conceal something valuable, like a treasure chest. Also somehow disposable. Both durable and fragile, renewable and precious.

Culinarily, eggs also exhibit gamelike qualities. They require dexterity, timing, creativity, strategy. There's success and failure states, but also, strangely, build variety, emergent gameplay, customization. The story goes that the chef's cap has 100 pleats to represent the 100 ways to cook an egg. All this to say, eggs are an excellent video game.

Arctic Eggs' bleak world-on-the-brink enforces a spartan simplicity on this possibility space: you are frying eggs over-easy in increasingly difficult dexterity challenges. The challenges are one-and-done, and finishing them unlocks new areas and progresses the story. The goofy physics engine game as a tactile gauntlet, one which ultimately the player needs to feel their way through. It presents the frozen slum society as a place where you can see more of the world by getting to know people and putting your heart into feeding them.