Now you’re cooking with ass

Wishlisting games on Steam is generally a net positive for me. I see a cool thing, I click the button, I wait however many years until the thing comes out, I play the game. In the case of 77p egg: Eggwife this was roughly a two year process. I fully expected this to be a shitpost of a game, and boy howdy did I get one.

I have two comparisons to make for Eggwife. The first is Postal, which is unsurprising given this game’s publisher, subject matter, and inclusion of a dedicated piss button. The other is a bit of a deeper cut; the South Park N64 game. It’s visually iffy and mechanically janky entirely on purpose, interested in bombarding you with mildly edgy chaos, also it kind of sucks.

Let’s back up a step – what even is a Wife’d Egg? Our hero, 77p (cent for my fellow Burgerland residents) Egg, is recently widowed. Extremely recently. Like, today. In a fatal masturbation Darwin Award-certified accident, no less. Everyone grieves differently, so Egg is on the prowl for a new wife. This adventure will not involve a single date, conversation, or even attraction. What it will consist of is shooting, pooting, screaming, and creaming.

I won’t beat around the untrimmed bush; the game’s writing and presentation feels like it fell right out of the early 2000s Flash era. Eggwife loves bodily fluids, drugs, and sex, but it knows as much about those last two topics as a teenager who brags about their very real girlfriend who lives in Canada but never visits. The “jokes”, such as they are, mostly consist of the existence of the thing in a place where it shouldn’t be. Oh this store sells bottled cum. Oh this gun shoots rocket tampons. Oh this lab is full of weed and weed accessories. Oh this computer has a poorly drawn picture of a My Little Pony OC with a massive censored cock. Sure. Ok. Whatever.

The thing is, the game all but grows out of its own juvenility during its own runtime. By about the ⅔ mark Eggwife mostly gives up trying to tell jokes and just becomes A Video Game. It’s almost as if another team took over, or the devs just got tired of the constant dick waggling. Levels become even more open, easier to clear, and almost weirdly quiet. It’s only here that I started to really come to grips with the mechanics, which is not too unreasonable given that they keep introducing weapons and tools all the way up to the last couple levels. It plays…fine? It’s fine. Only fine.

The movement includes extra jumps (powered by shitting in midair, because of course), which is a less wild choice than the increasingly popular horizontal dash or speedy slide of most modern boomer shooters, but Eggwife features significant amounts of platforming so it’s a natural fit/shit. Vehicle sections exist but don’t warrant more than one sentence of mention. What stood out most of all as the game tried to catch its breath was how uninteresting the levels are. Sure you can hug walls and make leaps for secrets, but the actual gameplay is largely dull. Enemies barely do anything beyond walk towards you and attack, and the level geometry just doesn’t make for good combat. I played through on Hard and there was exactly one level that presented any challenge purely because I was checkpointed with very low health. Could I have cranked it up more? Sure, and I tried a few levels while cranking it to find out. It’s still dull, just hurts more and leaves you a bit tired at the end.

Despite all my joyless whining I do have some positives here. An immense amount of work clearly went into this from a team with far more technical skill than may be immediately apparent. You can’t make a shitpost this large, ornate, and relatively bug-free without a ton of effort, and even if I don’t find the end result compelling I won’t deny that they committed to the bit. The main issue, as we saw in Kyle’s review of Wanted: Dead, is that you cannot create a successful meme game through sheer force of will. The more effort and craft applied, the more difficult it is to make a game that’s “bad on purpose” actually work. Eggwife is never earnest, always delivering its clownery with winks and nods and elbow nudges, constantly undercutting itself at every turn. It wants to tell the jokes while also being the joke, and as a result it fails to achieve either.

Comedy is as subjective as game quality. I’m sure this game has plenty of fans and will find more, though I’d bet it would mostly hit for folks who just want to point and laugh at its goofs as opposed to its gameplay. Alas, I am a killjoy and find Eggwife as funny as its mechanics are rewarding, which is to say I don’t.

3/10

PS: you can bake the cake in the lab level without breaking your vegan contract. You just have to cart a carton of vegan milk from a vending machine a mile away because the game is stupid.