The trailer for Egglings pulled me in. It looked like a mix-up of gatcha gameplay and creature collector mechanics. Egglings is that, but the trailer is expertly designed to make the game feel bigger than it is in reality. Even at the very cheap (cheap) price point of £2.49, I was left questioning the value of a game that wants you to spend tens of hours on rinse and repeat. Allow me to explain…
Egglings sees you play as a bird who incubates eggs for them to hatch so that you can repopulate the forest. The forest comes in the form of missions to release X amount of a certain type of animal. You’ll waddle to the shop, buy some eggs, carry them to the incubator, wait for the timer to reach zero for the egg to hatch, and then carry the animal to the forest. As eggs cost cash, you can choose to sell animals back to the shop to raise more funds, and if you do that a few times, you’ll be able to afford more expensive eggs to hatch bigger animals. The entire gameplay loop takes place across about four screens, with the fourth being a farm where you can place a limited amount of hatched animals for passive buffs. These can reduce incubation time, increase cash per sale, or increase your walking speed or carry speed. Ultimately, the farm feels very undercooked for what it delivers and you can largely ignore it.
The early game in Egglings is interesting, as you’ll be earning more cash to buy a wider range of eggs, which in turn fills out your beastary list. It is after the first 45 minutes that things start to go downhill. It was around here when I realised… hang on… this is the entire game. Egglings doesn’t change from minute 1 to hour 15. It is all about how long you want to spend trying to complete your beastary. Different eggs spawn different animals are certain percentage rates and each one has a golden version that’s incredibly rare. You could get lucky and grab most of them early, or you might be in for a massive slog. The farm can help improve your odds slightly, but not by much. Your mileage on Egglings will entirely depend on your OCD for completion. if you want to see the non-existent story reach its end, you’ll be done in about 4-6 hours. If you want to hatch everything… well, good luck.
I couldn’t face letting Egglings drag on to completion. I was bored and very quickly treated Egglings more like a bottom-of-the-screen idler game. I set up eggs and minimised the game whilst I did something else, and returned to collect and go again. None of this engaged me as a player, and whilst the animals sometimes look cute, being cute isn’t enough. There has to be some substance somewhere, but I couldn’t find it here. I recommend Egglings for extreme casual gamers only.
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