Roblox game Steal An Egg hides a TikTok treadmill inside its grind

Nearly 300 million plays, one very uncomfortable treadmill

Sometime last month, a Roblox game called Steal An Egg quietly launched and then immediately stopped being quiet. According to Dexerto, it has already racked up close to 300 million plays, landing just behind Catch a Brainrot on the platform’s charts. That is a lot of plays for any game, let alone one whose central mechanic turns out to be a direct reference to one of the bleakest half-hours of television ever made.

The hook is simple on its surface. Players work on a Speed stat, and the only way to raise it is by standing on a treadmill at their base. The treadmill has a TikTok-style video feed built into the screen. You can like clips, comment, and share without ever stepping off. Training your character, in other words, is just scrolling with extra steps. Literally.

From amazement to “this is not good” in three minutes

Roblox YouTuber Foltyn had apparently never heard of Steal An Egg before loading in, at which point he found 150,000 people already playing alongside him. As reported by Dexerto, his video captures the full emotional arc of discovering the treadmill mechanic in real time, and it moves fast.

The treadmill segment begins around the 5:38 mark of his video. He starts with something close to delight: “I have a treadmill now. What? Wait, what is this?” Within minutes that shifts to “This is going to have kids scrolling forever. How do I get out? Oh my gosh, this is not good.” His final verdict lands at “This game is going to rot everybody’s brains.”

For a creator whose entire career is built on finding joy in Roblox experiences, that is a notable place to land.

The Black Mirror episode nobody asked to be made real

It is nearly impossible to look at the mechanic without thinking of Black Mirror’s Fifteen Million Merits, the episode where people pedal stationary bikes to generate power and earn credits, all while being bombarded with screens they cannot turn off. The parallel is close enough that Dexerto drew it directly. Citizens in that episode have no choice but to consume. Players in Steal An Egg technically do, unless you count paying Robux to skip videos as a real choice, which, for a lot of the game’s younger audience, it probably is not.

That pay-to-skip structure is worth sitting with for a second. The game essentially offers two options: watch the feed and earn your Speed boost for free, or pay the platform’s premium currency to avoid watching. The attention loop is the product. The upgrade is the reward for tolerating it.

A platform reckoning with its own mechanics

Steal An Egg arrives at a strange moment for Roblox. The platform has been vocal about its reliance on viral content to drive engagement, and Catch a Brainrot, which sits just ahead of Steal An Egg on the charts, is itself built almost entirely around capitalizing on internet meme culture. There is a pattern forming around games that don’t just entertain players but actively study and replicate the mechanisms of online attention.

What makes Steal An Egg different is that it skips the metaphor entirely. It doesn’t simulate social media. It installs a version of it inside a treadmill and calls it gameplay. Foltyn’s reaction, genuine alarm from someone who has seen a lot of Roblox, suggests the design is working exactly as intended, which is either impressive or unsettling depending on how much you enjoyed Fifteen Million Merits.