Squareking of Easter

Squareking of Easter is one of those games where the title tells you exactly what you're getting: a king who's a square, Easter, and a whole lot of trouble. The hook is simple enough--you're trapped in a castle overrun by monsters, and the only way out is to find every hidden Easter egg in each level before you can open the final chest. That egg hunt is the core loop, but the game keeps throwing new wrinkles at you.

You control the Square King with WASD, and on mobile there's a virtual stick that works okay once you get used to it. The first few stages, like Main Hall and Kitchen Chaos, are basically tutorials. You dodge a few ground-level enemies--these round little blobs called Jelly Jesters that bounce toward you in straight lines. Eggs are sitting out in the open, maybe behind a crate or two. Easy stuff. You collect all six or seven eggs, a door unlocks, you reach the chest, level complete.

But the difficulty ramps up hard around level three, The Armory. That's where the first spinning blades appear--these things rotate around fixed points and have different speeds depending on the color. Red blades are fast, blue ones are slow but leave a bigger trail of damage. You have to time your dashes (yes, there's a dash, but the game never tells you--just double-tap a direction) between their rotations. Missing one means instant respawn at the last checkpoint, which are thankfully generous.

Later on, enemies get more annoying. Flying Phantoms hover and shoot little projectiles in a spread pattern, and Crusher Knights stomp down in a three-beat rhythm you have to memorize. By the time you hit The Dungeon and The Throne Room, you're juggling ground enemies, air enemies, spinning blades, and pressure plates that trigger arrow traps from walls. The eggs are hidden in trickier spots too--behind false walls that look solid, under breakable floor tiles, or inside rooms that only open after you kill a specific enemy.

What's satisfying is when you nail a clean run through a tough section without taking damage--the game has a little sound effect for that, a cheerful chime that feels earned. There's no upgrade system, which surprised me. You don't get better gear or new abilities. You just get better at reading patterns and reacting. That's the whole game: learn the enemy timing, memorize egg locations, and execute. Some levels have a handful of eggs, others have over a dozen. The final level, The Rooftop Escape, has twenty eggs scattered across a huge vertical climb with wind gusts that push you off edges. That one took me about forty tries.

The game doesn't overstay its welcome--maybe two to three hours for a first playthrough, but there are time trial modes unlocked after beating the main campaign. Those are for people who really want to optimize their route. I haven't touched those much. The movement feels responsive enough that deaths mostly feel like your fault, which is good. The music is this upbeat chiptune medley that loops, but after an hour you'll probably turn it off.