What came first, the indie game or the egg? None of these questions answered here in our Fowl Damage Review!

To make an omelette you must break a few eggs, and that appears to be the recipe to make a fantastic puzzle platformer too! May Gardens’ debut indie title has you rolling and jumping your way through many different lands as you search for a new home!

Fowl Damage Review – Story

Fowl Damage is very story lite. Waking in a large factory, you’ve got to leave your shell and venture into lands unknown to find a home! Everything else is of little importance as any large drop in height could leave you scrambled.

We all know eggs are laid by large industrial machines.

Fowl Damage Review – Gameplay

Movement is simple and limited in Fowl Damage, the only things you can do as a lowly egg is roll and leap. Don’t be mistaken, however, as your jump is nothing to be yolked about. The unfortunate reality is that you’re too fragile to survive the fall of your own jump, forcing you to be strategic about where and how you land. In the game’s several hour-long journey, you’ll find yourself in many varied environments ranging from an ominous factory to a dank river and a towering tree.

He’s eggtastic!

The game is filled from start to finish with expertly crafted stages that test your puzzle solving skills, utilizing the limitations of the eggs’ movement to its utmost potential. As the game progresses, new kinds of platforms and challenges are introduced making the difficulty scale with your accumulated knowledge. Except for the very last boss encounter, I never felt like the game was too unfair or difficult. I was consistently challenged, and never once wanted to put my keyboard down.

Egg + Feather = Chicken?

The game tracks both your deaths as well as time spent in the game, making it perfect for players wanting to prove themselves. If the base game isn’t quite enough for you, there are also two types of coloured feathers you can pick up throughout your journey. The Pink feathers are tracked through each chapter and are mostly easy to obtain through a little extra effort. The green feathers are much harder to get and require you to avoid cracking under pressure. While somewhat testing, most of the game’s levels are one screen, meaning that if you die you respawn immediately back where you entered the screen. This makes dying trivial, something that feels encouraging as you try the sequence again and again.

Fowl Damage Review – Audio/Visual

Fowl Damage boasts a clearly detailed pixel aesthetic with some wildly varied environments, each with their own mechanical differences. The riverbed level allows for smaller jumps when sitting in water, while the factory level has a lot of moving blocks and laser beams. The game does well to distinguish each biome from one another, while sewing them all together to make a coherent series of events.

How long can an egg hold it’s breath?

What stands out in Fowl Damage is the visual clarity on display through every inch of the game. Being a precision platformer, it’s important to know exactly where you’ll be landing and jumping from. May Gardens nailed this detail, sticking to a visual ruleset that made the game fair while also allowing for several secret areas for the more keen-eyed egg-er. The foley is a highlight of Fowl Damage’s sound design, especially in the moments without a backing soundtrack. You suffer through the sound of every egg you splat, feel relieved when you hear the faint *pop* when falling into a bubble of water, moving stone blocks groan as they slowly move towards you.

Do your best to avoid getting scrambled!

The soundtrack compliments the environments perfectly, whether it be the strange melodies in the warp zones or the soft piano tunes playing at the serene riverbed. This then kicks up a notch when in high-intensity situations. It’s an experience I can’t fault, simply a joy to listen to in the moment.

Fowl Damage Review – What Else?

After you’ve finished the game, you can head over to the main menu and try your hand at the level editor. I visited the steam page myself during this time and found a couple of creative levels people had shared. It’s a great addition that slightly extends the life of an already engaging game.

Building a home in the level eggitor.

Fowl Damage Review – Conclusion

Fowl Damage is a strong contender for best puzzle-platformer this year. The thoughtful puzzles will challenge you throughout your entire journey, while keeping things light by limiting stages mostly to one screen and featuring instant respawns. While the narrative is inconsequential, the landscapes the story takes you through are wonderfully crafted and varied.

Why you might like to take a crack at Fowl Damage:

• Accessible and engaging puzzles
• Plenty of extras to collect for people that want a little extra challenge
• It’s a cute lil egg

Why you might find Fowl Damage a little rotten:

• There is little story outside of what you interpret
• The final encounter is far more difficult than anything else in game
• A bare bones options menu with no key remapping

A review code was kindly provided by May Gardens for the purpose of our Fowl Damage Review.  You can check out our other reviews here and if you haven’t already, be sure to join the Qualbert Discord to find out about the latest game and review updates!