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Good games obscure their emotional underpinnings with enjoyable gameplay, but the best let you be a little bastard while you do it.
Bad Magpie, the debut game from London-based indie studio Milktooth, follows the proud tradition of players controlling animals committing misdemeanor chaos, like Untitled Goose Game. They’re joyful exercises in cutting loose and making life minorly worse for everyone else. But there’s a thematic throughline to Bad Magpie that ties into a very human experience.
“The idea [for Bad Magpie] came out of a very sad place: One of us was going through heartbreak, another of us had a loss in our family, and we thought it would be interesting to have a game that isn’t allegory for that grief but, in particular, the avoidance coming out of grief, not being able to face up to an emotional truth,” said Daisy Fernandez, design director at Milktooth.
The idea of a magpie — a corvid that’s cousin to crows and known for playfulness as well as using tools — desperately collecting shiny things to avoid its abandonment was a compelling conceit for Fernandez and her colleagues at Milktooth.
“There’s this saying in British folklore — it might just be general folklore, I’m not sure — but ‘One for sorrow, two for joy.’ So, the idea being that if you see one magpie, it’s bad luck, if you see two, it’s good luck,” Fernandez said. “So it’s like, what if a magpie had these weird attachment issues.”
Hours after Xbox’s trailer showcase the weekend of Summer Game Fest 2026, I sat down to try out about 15 minutes of Bad Magpie, just enough to get a taste of its gameplay and the barest inkling of the emotional beats to come.
The game had me start out on a quiet road leading up to a schoolyard. The first thing the game had me do was walk up to a rock and peck it until it started a fire, burning the grass around it — and setting the log I picked up aflame so that I could torch some path-blocking planks to enter a playground.
The game is stylish, with a painterly look matching the playfulness of the antics my bad bird is up to. It’s hard to stay mad at the varmint, as they look so cute short-hopping to and fro.
The goal presented in the demo was to collect prismatically colorful crystals, which were hidden in trees and lodged in hard-to-reach locations that required some light environmental puzzle-solving to secure. Most often, that meant vandalism or other chicanery, from breaking bottles to screaming at mice through a megaphone.
There were some delightful little set pieces in the demo, from digitalizing the magpie to walk through several monitors, recovering said megaphone, to unrolling a giant piano pad that required dropping books on specific keys to play a particular chord. It’s lighthearted fun while the magpie is on a mission collecting crystals for a big, shiny star — a purpose that fills the void of abandonment if you’re paying attention.
It’s a tightrope to walk, and Milktooth wanted to deliver delightful gameplay with emotional stakes to the chaos without being too heavy-handed about its serious themes. This is their differentiator from a lot of animal games. They pitched the game as Untitled Goose Game meets Shadow of the Colossus; Fernandez said, “Because yeah, menacing evil bird, but what if emotional stakes were underneath it?”
In that comparison, the star you’re collecting crystals for is the colossus. You collect shiny trinkets for the star and are immediately sent out to get another one, an interaction that feels increasingly shallow and sad — a perfect distraction because it’s never satisfying.
“You’re trying to fulfill some kind of relationship or antisocial activity that never has a positive endpoint, but always makes you feel distracted in an avoidant way,” Fernandez said. “It’s the dawning sense of what you’re doing isn’t going somewhere good — there’s a kind of sadness that’s imbued in the menace.”
Since the game is nonlinear, the expectation is that as players collect more trinkets however they choose, the underlying themes will start settling in. It’s a low-pressure way to convey a deeper humane experience that players might share with the calamity corvid they’ve been controlling.
“To just see someone have some sort of catharsis when they play it, and be surprised at the depth of it, to feel they recognize themselves and their avoidance in the bird, and see some sort of resolution that leaves them feeling less alone — that’s what I think they all are looking for,” Fernandez said.
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