Video game about cooking eggs sends you to hell if you mess up

December 6, 2017

[GIF by: Babylon Brooks]

There’s a new video game called Hell that’s about cooking eggs—seriously. But, well, the game has a dark side: If you drop some of the eggs, you’ll find yourself thrust into a pit of never-ending evil. Sounds fun, right?

That’s the gist of Babylon Brooks‘ Hell, created for the game jam A Game By Its Cover. As entertainingly laid out by Heather Alexandra at Kotaku, the new indie game starts simply enough but soon becomes a demonic labyrinth of “mischief and debauchery,” led by stacks on stacks of chickens.

*Spoilers ahead* for those who want to go into Hell completely blind: You crack an egg in the pan, it sizzles, you crack another. But if you drop an egg, it hatches, and you’re controlling a chick as it searches for food. Gets enough food and it becomes a chicken. Eat some more, and that chicken can lay more eggs. It apparently can go on and on like this… if you want it to.

What Alexandra discovered while playing the game was that once you have a whole brood of chickens, you can stack them on top of each other. With a totem pole of chickens reaching the countertop to fry up some eggs, dropping one results in you being dropped into a diabolical netherworld.

“Time it right and crack the egg!” reads the game’s synopsis. “If you miss, it’ll turn into a chick, so time it right and give it food! When it grows up and lays an egg, time it right and crack the egg! Crack the egg, and if you fry it up, time it right and eat up! If you couldn’t fry it up, you will be sent to hell.”

And that’s when shit gets dark. Arriving in hell “changes the game into a tile-based dungeon crawler all about collecting items, dealing with demons, and learning all of the seven deadly sins so you can light a group of ritual altars.” The evil quest has the player embodying the sins in some sort of bizarre chicken-and-egg version of David Fincher’s Seven: Shoot a bunch of stuff to manifest wrath, eat a lot of hamburgers to become gluttony, and so on.

That’s one strange journey for a video game that starts with simply cracking some eggs! Think you’ve got what it takes to cook eggs and/or combat the fiery anguish of Hades? You can get Hell here for Mac and Windows.

This week’s indie pick is Hell by @BABYLON_BROOKS. Seriously, go play this.https://t.co/Jt5zmW2lB7

— Heather Alexandra (@transgamerthink) December 6, 2017