Great games hide their emotional underpinnings with fun gameplay, but the best ones let you be a bit of a bastard while you do it.
Bad Magpie, the first game from London-based indie studio Milktooth, follows in the proud tradition of players controlling animals who wreak mischief, much like the Untitled Goose Game. They are fun exercises to relieve yourself and make life a little worse for everyone. But there is a theme line in The Bad Magpie that intersects with the human experience.
“The concept [for Bad Magpie] it came from a very sad place: One of us was sad, one of us lost our family, and we thought it would be fun to have a game that is not a representation of that sadness, but, mainly, to avoid sadness, to not be able to face the emotional truth,” said Daisy Fernandez, director of design at Milktooth.
The idea of a magpie — a corvid cousin to crows and known for playing and using tools — to gather shiny objects to avoid abandonment was a compelling conceit for Fernandez and his colleagues at Milktooth.
“There’s this saying in British history — it might be traditional, I’m not sure — but ‘One for sorrow, two for joy.’ So, the idea is that if you see one magpie, it’s bad luck, if you see two, it’s good luck,” said Fernandez. “So, what if a magpie has these unusual attachment problems.”
After hours Xbox trailer show on the weekend of Summer Game Fest 2026I sat down to try about 15 minutes of Bad Magpie, just enough to get a taste of its gameplay and a faint inkling of the emotional beats to come.
The game made me start in the quiet street leading to the school yard. The first thing the game had me do was go up to a rock and click on it until it started a fire, burning the grass around it — and I set the log I picked up on fire so I could light the planks blocking the way to enter the playground.
The game is stylish, with a painted look that complements the antics my bad bird can do. It’s hard to stay mad at a varmint, as it looks so cute jumping around.
The goal presented in the demo was to collect brightly colored crystals, which were hidden in trees and placed in hard-to-reach places that required simple environmental puzzle solving to secure. Usually, that meant vandalism or other mischief, from breaking bottles to shouting at rats through a megaphone.
There were some fun little bits in the demo, from digitizing a magpie to move between several monitors, to finding an articulated megaphone, to disassembling a grand piano that required dropping books on certain keys to play a certain song. It’s heartwarming when a magpie is on a mission to collect crystals for a big, shiny star — a mission that fills the void if you’re paying attention.
It’s a tightrope to walk, and Milktooth wanted to bring a fun and emotional gameplay to the chaos without being heavy-handed about its serious themes. This is their difference from most animal games. They stopped the game as the Untitled Goose Game meets Shadow of the Colossus; Fernandez said, “Because yes, it’s a bad threatening bird, but what if the emotional stakes were under it?”
In that comparison, the star you collect the crystals from is the colossus. You collect shiny trinkets for a star and are quickly sent off to find another, an interaction that feels shallow and sad — a distraction that’s perfect because it’s so unsatisfying.
“You’re trying to achieve some kind of relationship or social activity that doesn’t have a good ending, but it always makes you feel frustrated in an avoidant way,” Fernandez said. “It’s a nascent sense that what you’re doing isn’t going anywhere — there’s a kind of sadness that’s full of menace.”
Since the game is non-linear, the expectation is that as players collect as many trinkets as they choose, basic themes will begin to settle. It’s a low-pressure way to convey a deep sense of humanity that players can share with the corvid disaster they’ve been controlling.
“Just to see someone have some kind of catharsis when they play it, and be surprised by the depth of it, to feel that they know themselves and avoid the bird, and to see some kind of resolution that leaves them feeling less alone – that’s what I think they all want,” said Fernandez.