77p egg: Eggwife  Review

Do you remember Conker’s Bad Fur Day, the cute-looking, but ultimately very much adult, platformer for the Nintendo 64? Ok, what about POSTAL 2? Well, throw them into a blender, add in a pinch of Goat Simulator and Duke Nukem, leave a bottle of jank nearby and presto bismol, you have 77p egg: Eggwife. Revelling in the sort of humour some would find appalling — and some hilarious — and doing things with a very “eh, good enough” attitude, will this game wear down my defences and make me love it, or will my therapist be getting midnight calls again? Let’s find out!

The game is — to my surprise — a sequel to an audio series called 77p shitcom: season 1, though no knowledge of it is needed to enjoy the game. You take on the role of 77p egg, or Steventy Steven Pegg as is its real name, who has lost its beloved Eggwife in a tragic sexual mishap. After a healthy few hours of grieving, our hero decides enough is enough and sets its sights on the town of Sheffie, England to find a new lifelong companion. The first place to start, naturally, is the supermarket! If only things were so simple…

Ahh, the beauty of the countryside

The game is, at heart, an FPS, and it controls as such. As seen in the gameplay video we made, the movement speed is very fast, letting you manoeuvre around the relatively open spaces quite handily! You also have the ability to kick, which allows you to interact with some objects, like kicking a ball, and you also have a button to... erm… relieve yourself. This is used to put out fires and open doors, naturally. Along with the high-speed movement, you also have a double jump! It is, however, used at the expense of your bowels, which means an empty stomach will lead to a wilting toot instead of the mighty plop a double jump needs. Eating food is the easiest way to keep your bottom loaded and ready, and it also acts as healing! Once you acquire a weapon (more on those in a bit), you click the mouse to shoot and right-click to use secondary fire, if available. If you’ve played an FPS, this should be pretty clear, in addition to the whole door-opening debacle.

77p egg: Eggwife is split into 10 distinct levels, each with its own themes and ideas, usually paired with more enemies and a longer playtime. What begins as a simple trip to the supermarket quickly escalates into an infiltration mission, a battle against sentient sewage, a trip through places much too moist, stool-based armageddon, fighting a cow-obsessed cult, and an honest Eurobeat driving section. And that was the abridged version! I was constantly surprised with what the game came up with next, and while the subject matters were not up my alley — I’m sorry, I don’t find poop jokes funny — I was impressed with the level of creativity on display!

Indeed.

Each level introduces something new, be it in terms of level design, enemy variety, or just new and exciting ways to make me regret eating dinner. For example, in the first level, your apartment, there is no combat whatsoever, and you can explore the area at your leisure, experimenting with the controls, etc. The second level, Sheffie proper, is a large map to explore with some points of interest to check out and some easter eggs to find, and the third level is a full-on infiltration with a soundtrack straight from Goldeneye, wherein the actual shooting part of this FPS begins.

The actual combat of 77p egg is pretty boilerplate: you move fast, shooting at everything that is giving you the evil eye while trying to dodge their attacks. I don’t have much to comment on there. It was fun and did its job, but it didn’t add much in terms of innovation. The guns, however, are another matter. You start off with an axe, i.e. a guitar you hit people with, naturally. From there, you’ll find a nail gun called the Stigmatic, which is basically a machine gun, a Potty Cannon, the Applicator, and the Pisstol to name a few. Almost all of the guns have a primary and secondary fire, which adds some fun additions to each. They are wacky and sometimes feel very ineffective, but honestly, I loved all of them. They also had a surprising level of “depth”, as one weapon could cover the floor with sewage-destroying bleach while another could zap any liquid they were near!

The enemy variety is pretty good, running the gambit of a manure-themed tank to a cultist with milk-based powers. Each opponent also requires some level of strategy, as sewage bubbles can take over the minds of innocent cows, but the powerful testicle can be defeated with a well-placed kick. One enemy I did hate beyond anything else, as it felt very unfair, but I’ll let you experience that yourselves. You’ll know it when you hear it, believe me.

Speaking of hearing, the game is a weird mix of good and bad: the music is weirdly amazing. From the Goldeneye-esque spy beats to the honest-to-goodness Eurobeat you hear later, I was stunned at how good some of them were! I know I didn’t expect much, but dang! The gun effects sound ok, with most being some iteration of moist. The biggest problem is the stepping noise our lovely egg makes. Every step makes a semi-loud thump, and at the speeds you go, it gets grating quickly!

That's not how keys... actually, never mind.

Before I knit my thoughts together on the game, there is one obscene elephant in the room: the humour. Though I have danced around the subject, there are no two ways about it: 77p egg: Eggwife is a dirty, dirty game. It is difficult to go more than a few steps without doing, seeing, saying, or hearing something rude; you can, erm, insert certain phallic objects, the little nuggets of offal you produce on a double jump can be put back in, and the levels themselves compete with each other to be the grossest experience possible. I do not especially enjoy this type of humour, and if that sounded disgusting, this is not the game for you. However, even toilet humour can be inventive and creative, and 77p egg does have a few instances where even I chuckled — in self-defence, if nothing else — but I repeat, this game is nasty. Not for those with a weak stomach!

I went into 77p egg: Eggwife expecting a silly game about fart jokes and stool; while this is exactly what I got, I was still impressed by the creativity and humour on display. The different kinds of gameplay were fun, the gunplay is passable, and honestly, it’s short enough that you can get it over and done within a session or two! The humour is a definite sticking point, as it is not for everyone. The rough edges of the game can also be annoying, though I can’t really complain too much, as the description of the game clearly states it’s “good enough”, which is a good way to describe the game as a whole.