Crack Open the Unknown: New Steam Co-op Indie Makes You Smash a Mysterious Living Egg With a Pickaxe

A new co-op indie game called Crack is asking players to crack open an enormous, mysterious egg in an unknown laboratory — armed with nothing but a pickaxe and sheer determination — ahead of its October 26 release on Steam. The title arrives as part of what many observers are calling a golden age of peculiar Steam releases, where developers pursue delightfully narrow premises without apology.

In Crack, players are dropped into a laboratory containing an egg of indeterminate origin and contents. Nobody in the game knows where it came from or what lives inside it; the only instruction is to smash it open. From there, the experience expands well beyond simple whacking into what the developers describe as an “incremental adventure,” meaning progress compounds over time rather than relying on a single repetitive action.

A Pickaxe, Then Dynamite

The journey begins with comparatively sensible egg-cracking equipment such as pickaxes and chisels before players unlock more elaborate methods, including dynamite and what the press materials vaguely describe as “other weird tools” scattered throughout the mysterious laboratory. Beyond raw force, Crack offers systems for building scaffolding, discovering secret rooms, and converting broken shell fragments into currency — a loop that rewards experimentation with the environment.

“The egg has secrets,” and “The egg reacts to you. Whatever you do to it, it responds.”

Crack press release

That final line — that the egg itself is alive and responsive — adds a layer of unease to what might otherwise read as a straightforward destruction simulator. It also places Crack in direct conversation with one of gaming’s most infamous experiments in collective curiosity.

The Ghost of Curiosity

Anyone who has followed indie game history will recognize the DNA here. The premise echoes Peter Molyneux’s 2013 phenomenon Curiosity: What’s Inside the Cube?, a crowdsourced experiment that invited strangers worldwide to take turns chipping away at a giant cube, promising whoever reached its core a life-changing prize. That promise ultimately dissolved into a revenue share in Molyneux’s later title Godus — a game that had not turned a profit by 2017 and therefore offered nothing worth sharing.

The comparison is unavoidable but perhaps unfair to Crack. Where Curiosity sold an elaborate marketing fantasy, the newer title seems content simply to lean into its own absurd specificity without making grander promises about what waits inside its shell.

A Golden Age of Weird Time-Sinks

Crack is just the latest in a run of wonderfully specific Steam games that seem uniquely suited to the platform’s discovery machinery. The pattern appears everywhere: someone cultivates one deeply silly idea, refuses to dilute it with common sense, and somehow makes the premise more compelling by treating it entirely seriously.

The current landscape is rich with such oddities. There are titles dedicated to hunting for a needle in an enormous haystack, Needle In A Haystack Simulator where players can roughly deduce the main mechanic after some trial and error, as well as a thriving genre of tidying games that keep people — journalists included — transfixed by the simple act of stacking shelves on a virtual display.

If this trend continues, one wonders what remains unexplored. A game solely dedicated to peeling the labels off beer bottles in dimly lit dive bars still awaits its brave pioneer; until then, Crack claims the spotlight for now.

Looking Ahead

Crack is scheduled to launch on Steam on October 26, with players able to add it to their wishlists ahead of that date. here. As interest builds around its responsive egg and escalating arsenal of cracking tools, the question hanging over every prospective player remains the same one posed by the laboratory itself: whatever you do to it, how will it respond?