Game developers have suddenly become obsessed with eggs for some reason, and you can play two ovoid games for free right now

Eggs! They’re the new gaming craze, baby. Forget roguelikes, or friendslop, or rogue friends, or sloplikes, eggs are the hottest they’ve been in the virtual realm since the days of Tamagotchi.

Just how hot, you ask? Well, there are three egg-themed games launching within a week of each other. Which isn’t that many in the grand Steam of things, but in my book it still qualifies as an eggstrava—no, spare them the egg puns, Rick. Nobody deserves that.

Two of these games are similar to the point where they could’ve been laid by the same hen. The other looks like it sluiced from the cloaca of some shrieking nightmare chicken that escaped from Cthulhu’s battery farm.

Anyway, let’s cra- uh, move on, starting with the simplest. Egg (subtitled ‘Why not be an egg’?) is the new game from VVVVVV and Super Hexagon creator Terry Cavanagh. Available on Itch, it’s a lo-fi, 3D puzzle platformer where you must guide a box of half-a-dozen eggs across a vertiginous, grassy cliffside searching for a lovely nest to, well, nestle in.

The eggs navigate across the landscape by jumping. The longer you hold down the spacebar, the farther your chosen ovum will jump. If an egg falls off a platform, it breaks, respawning at the nearest checkpoint.

Egg lasts about an hour and costs nothing to play. It’s very silly and completely throwaway, but surprisingly fun. That said, if you’re after a little extra in your egg-themed experience (you have no idea how close my pun-gland is to bursting) you might want to hold out for Egging On.

Developed by Egobounds (one G, tragically), Egging On is also about guiding an egg across hazardous terrain. It’s a much more elaborate affair than Egg, however, as you escape the dilapidated chicken coop you were hatched in to roll and bounce your way across a variety of detailed environments while striving to maintain the integrity of your shell.

Locations include a farmhouse and a neon-drenched bar, where you’ll encounter obstacles like makeshift trampolines and spinning cogwheels. Egging On is out on November 6, which, teasingly, is a Thursday.

Finally, there is Evil Egg. Unlike the other two games, eggs are not the core component of the dish here. Instead, they are a supplementary ingredient, plonked on top like a salad nicoise. Framed as a faux-historical arcade machine lost to time and then retrieved and restored, Evil Egg puts you in the role of a newly hatched mushroom thing charged with saving a world filled with little green men, which seems like a lot of responsibility for a creature only a few seconds old.

Evil Egg plays like an 80s demake of The Binding of Isaac, with you moving through doors situated at points on the compass and blasting a variety of monsters on the resulting screen. Visually, it resembles what you see if you press the heels of your hands into your eyes—all coloured flashes and skittering shapes that move to scratchy bleeps and bloops and whooshes.

While I’m not much of an arcade guy. I found Evil Egg to be immediately engaging, and I get the sense that there’s Weird Stuff lurking beneath the surface. Like Terry Cavanagh’s Egg, Evil Egg is available now and costs nothing to download and play. Phew, made it all the way to end without a single egg pun. That wasn’t too eggregious, was it?