by James Liu
Roblox’s tenth annual Easter egg hunt has arrived, and I’m not feeling so good, Mr. Stark. It’s sponsored by Avengers: Endgame, and yes, you can wear an official Infinity Gauntlet in all your favorite Roblox games! The sponsor out of the way, this year is most likely going to be the last egg hunt, and it’s going out pretty underwhelmingly. Roblox’s annual egg hunts involve finding virtual eggs you can wear, with some designs pushing the limits on what can be called an “egg”. We’ve gotten a woolly mammoth egg (an egg that looks like a woolly mammoth, not the egg of a woolly mammoth), Titanic egg, and backpack egg, and that’s just this year! While most previous egg hunts have been made by a central team to create a single game, this year’s egg hunt is taking place across many games, with the eggs for these games being made by the game creators. With an exception for 2015 which had a similar pattern to this year, using three already existing games to host the egg hunt. While this may sound like a good idea, it’s easy to see the high levels of varying quality among the parts of the event. Since there’s well over 40 games, I don’t have the time to discuss the specific game’s requirements and personal opinions. I did that while earning every egg, and I got about 10 pages of Google Docs.
To start, let me talk about the egg I felt the most indifferent about. Didn’t love, didn’t hate, but it was fine. Pick a Side is a combat based game where you sword fight people to the death over opinion based questions, like tacos versus burritos, blind musician or deaf artist, marry someone who hates you or marry someone you hate, etc. The requirements are spelled out pretty nicely in the lobby. There’s a 30% chance that the battle will have eggs raining down. Whichever side has the most eggs wins the event. If you have the larger side, you’re most likely going to win. The event comes by rarely enough to force you to learn how to play and have a bit of fun with the actual game, but commonly enough to not make you sick of waiting if you lose. It could have been made to be a bit more fair if you end up on a minority opinion, like more health or speed to pick up eggs, but overall a few rounds should be enough to give you a good chance of winning. It makes you play without feeling like it’s forcing you to play, and the random chance events are pretty common. Like I said, I didn’t love it, didn’t hate it, there’s much better and worse in this event. Now let’s start from the worst and move our way up to the best:
Roblox Point is a virtual theme park that you can explore. Ride rollercoasters and have fun with friends, without the fear that it’ll rain! For the egg hunt, you must ride on eight different rides in a certain order hinted at by a riddle you’re given to unlock a secret area that contains the egg. Walking around the park and riding on each ride takes a whole lot of time, about half an hour to get to eight different rides if you take a bit over three minutes to walk and get on each ride, assuming you have the correct order as soon as you start. It’s tedious and boring to walk around just to check another ride off the list. This section could have easily been shortened to half the time by reducing the number of rides to unlock the egg, and would’ve been over twice as fun.
The next egg that I hated a lot was in Epic Minigames. Play minigames with friends and random people online! There’s over eighty of them! To earn the egg, you must win a certain minigame designed for the egg hunt. But what about the other eighty games? They absolutely do not matter if you just want this egg. But hold on! You can pay money to get the minigame for the egg if you can’t wait for a one in eighty-ish chance! This event feels like it was just designed to make people pay up. There’s going to be three winners at most based on how the game was designed, with you being forced to push one of the three eggs into a small zone you control and keep it there to win. The eggs slip around a lot as well, making this game feel more luck based than skill. It took about a half hour of playing with someone with some robux to burn to win.
Finally for the egg I hated the most, Dance Your Blox Off is a dancing game where you’re judged by other players on your dancing skills. Bust a move and get funky out there! To earn the egg, you must earn first place in a round while having the egg equipped as a prop like a baton or ribbon. While you can tie for first, chances are much more likely that only one person will win per round. Given that your score is based on what other people vote, I hope you like dancing for two hours. Yes, that’s how long it actually took me. I absolutely hated earning this thing, and put it off until the last one for a reason. The easiest fix for this event would be to just let anyone placed in the top three earn the egg. I recall getting second twice, and I would have saved well over an hour if that was the case. This section feels like it was designed to keep you playing for a real long time, and it succeeded.
Now what about good eggs? I hated the three eggs above for being absolutely boring time wasters, one of which also felt like it was designed to force people to pay for the egg, so how would you make a good event? Let’s take a look at my favorites now:
Shark Bite is a game about sharks and hunters. Put two and two together and it should be fairly easy to guess what you have to do. To win this egg, you must let the shark break open a large egg on your boat as a hunter, which has the actual egg you want to earn inside. The event forces you to abandon all the normal logic about shark hunting, like ditching ship into shark infested waters and letting your boat get broken. It turns the game on its head, and while you can leave once you get the egg inside, it’ll be a real interesting matchup fighting a shark without a boat to drive. The shark moves fast, so the egg doesn’t take too long to earn, and anyone can earn it after a few rounds of trial and error.
Next up, Super Bomb Survival, which is not a violent game, I swear. Cartoon bombs are raining from the sky, and you must run, duck, and jump around to not blow up! Use special abilities to heal up, damage other people, or make a last-second escape from death! To earn this egg, you must break open its protective shield using the falling bombs or bombs from special skills. It’s a fun challenge that mixes risk and reward, stay close and risk taking damage from bombs that are being used to break the shield, or stay away and risk being too far to grab the egg when the shield breaks. Fun fact: Remember when I said that in 2015, they used three pre-existing games for the egg hunt? Super Bomb Survival was one of the three from that event! Of the other two games in that 2015 egg hunt, one is very inactive at this point, and the other is still doing very well. Fun facts about old Roblox history aside, this egg was definitely designed to be a fun challenge, testing your reactions, speed, and dodging abilities all at once.
Finally, my favorite egg comes from a less that positively reviewed game. Hackr is a game where you can pretend to be a hacker, shutting off lights, and controlling cameras, all with a smartphone and some computer knowledge. It has a 36% like rate as of the writing of this article, yet still does a better job of making a fun egg than other more liked games. To earn the egg, you must find the letters in the word MATRIX scattered across the area. Where would I even begin to look, though? In an area dedicated to the egg, QR codes are visible on walls that will give you a clue to a certain letter when scanned. This mechanic is a cool way to add in hints without being overly obvious, and tie into the hacking and technology theme of the game. It’s 100% not the most advanced thing in the world to open up a QR code scanner, but it’s a nice touch and shows that a bit more thought went into making an egg that’s fun and relates back to the original game.
So, to summarize a whole lot of rambling about Roblox games: The worst eggs in my opinion were the ones that were unnecessarily long and could easily have been made shorter and easier, while my favorite eggs were the ones that tried something new or unique, and made me enjoy playing through the game. Overall, the event was mostly time consuming, with some highlights. I didn’t even get to talk about the Thanos egg because of how much I had to say about some of the other games…
