Arctic Eggs

20 5月 2024

The answer may surprise you.

Arctic Eggs tells you that you have no freedom except that you can walk and you have a frying pan. You ask people if they're hungry, and they ask for eggs with cockroaches and sometimes ice cubes.

So, you go around and you hear people talking about making a time-lapse of meat rotting in their apartment. Nihilism is in the air: the world is going to enter into a new ice age, chicken farms are outlawed, and people can't remember what pink flamingos look like. Each text describes a fleeting moment or thought of a character whose backstory is unknown to us. I'm a stranger to the setting, but I'm here to listen to wishes and cook eggs.

The main mechanic of this game is simple: you have a frying pan and you need to cook eggs and whatever toppings the denizens of Antarctica are craving. You swirl around the ingredients (ah, they really want cigarettes to flavor their eggs) and flip the eggs or fish or whatever food they want. Everyone will be healed by your masterful cooking while you listen to some hot post-apocalyptic jams.

Recognizing that this game could aggravate my wrist problems, I opted for the controller. The controls are simple: L2 to stabilize your pan, right analog to rotate, release L2 when objects are on the side to flip them. But there's still a layer of complexity as more different types of objects are added and eggs start to overlap, making them uncooked.

This can get frustrating as the game lacks drop shadows for most things -- ice cubes were so notoriously difficult that the developer added shadows -- and the physics can get bizarre quickly. There are difficulty settings that change the shape of the pan, and that's it. You still have to deal with the gameplay, you just have more leeway. The game isn't particularly long, so there's a nagging feeling that the game is trying to extend its length by making the gameplay annoying.

But I found this mechanic interesting from a narrative standpoint. Nobody knows how to cook, and the way they treat their food is alien to our current standard of living. I'm just blending in: I can cook a little better than any of these people, and they marvel that I can cook sausages and fish without breaking a sweat. It doesn't matter that I've accidentally flung my eggs several times. The fact that I've done it is still incredible in a culture that has forgotten what a cuisine should look, taste, and feel like. There are no vegetables. Organic matter seems to be down to chicken eggs, sausages, fish, and cockroaches. Nobody is eating healthy, but how could you: the world is ending and all you have is a bunch of cigarettes you don't want to waste.

The more I cook, the less culture shock I experienced. I knew my character's motivations to meet the Saint of Seven Stomachs, but the real reason I cooked stingrays and pufferfish was to hear what people were feeling. There are games with more standard settings and professions where you listen to what people moan about their lives, but being a cyberpunk bartender is not as exciting as cooking eggs with tank ammo in your frying pan. The dialog is also unusual but familiar: everyone has one or two lines about the vibes they are experiencing while living in this hell space.

I can guess the intent behind each satirical narration, but they all seem like lines I've scavenged from a future version of social media. They read like utterances from the future, subposting on events that have traumatized their speakers.

I was disconnected from the contexts these lines meant, but this archaeological exercise somehow felt resonant: I felt like I was connecting with people living in a distant dystopian future through these strange poems left by people who really loved my fried eggs. Foreign yet emotive, these stories evoke dreams of a world now lost, and their tellers can only philosophize about their impending doom.

The language differs, but the sentiments are the same: am I really cooking eggs for the future or for a present that's losing hope every second?

I often find myself thinking about Arctic Eggs, not because it's a must-play, but because it evokes a nostalgia for our present. Characters wistfully describe how people used to have it good until all their privileges and luxuries vanished into the ether.

The only vehicle that connects us and them is our frying pan. I don't have the brains to explain the philosophical or ecological underpinnings of the game, but I still felt something in their nostalgia. Their wonder at the simple act of frying eggs fascinates me in ways I cannot describe. And so, I lack the imagination to express what's so profoundly alienating about this game.

That is why this game captured my imagination: I don't know what I was playing, and I'm glad that my ignorance allowed me to appreciate how strange and bizarre this game is. I hope more people will play this game soon.