Bad Magpie is a fun game about destructively avoiding your emotions

Good games mask their emotional underpinnings with fun gameplay, but the best ones let you be a little scoundrel while doing so.

Bad Magpie, the first game from London-based indie studio Milktooth, follows the proud tradition of players controlling animals and committing a misdemeanor of mayhem, much like Untitled Goose Game. They’re delightful exercises in letting loose and making life a little worse for everyone else. But there’s a thematic throughline to Bad Magpie that connects to a very human experience.

“The idea for ‘Bad Magpie’ came from a very sad place: one of us was going through a lot of grief, another of us was going through a loss in our family, and we thought it would be interesting to have a game that symbolizes not only that grief, but in particular, the avoidance of coming out of grief, of not being able to face the emotional truth,” said Daisy Fernandez, design director at Milktooth.

The idea of ​​magpies — a crow-like relative of crows known for playfulness as well as tool use — collecting shiny objects to avoid giving them away was compelling to Fernandez and her colleagues at Milktooth.

“There’s such a saying in British folklore — maybe it’s just general folklore, I’m not sure — but ‘one for sadness, two for joy.’ “So, the idea is that if you see one magpie, it’s bad luck, and if you see two, it’s good luck,” Fernandez said. “So it’s as if the magpie has these weird attachment problems.”

After hours Xbox trailer Weekend Summer Games Festival 2026I sat down to sample about 15 minutes of Bad Magpie, just enough to get a taste of its gameplay and get a sense of the emotional beats to come.

The game had me start on a quiet road leading to the schoolyard. The first thing the game asked me to do was walk up to a rock and tap it until it burst into flames, burning the grass around it – and set fire to the log I picked up so I could light some planks blocking the path to enter the field.

The game is stylish, with a graphical look that matches the fun of the antics my bad bird is up to. It’s hard to stay mad at the pets, because they look so cute pacing back and forth.

The goal presented in the demo was to collect prismatic colored crystals, which were hidden in trees and resting in hard-to-reach locations that required some light environmental puzzle solving to secure. More often than not, that meant vandalism or other fraud, from breaking bottles to yelling at mice through a megaphone.

There were some delightful little set pieces in the demo, from the magpie digitizing to walk across several screens, reclaiming said speaker, to opening up a giant piano pad that required dropping books on specific keys to play a specific chord. It’s a lighthearted romp as Magpie is on a mission to collect crystals for a big, bright star – an item that fills the void of abandonment if you’ve been paying attention.

It’s a tightrope to walk, and Milktooth wanted to deliver exhilarating gameplay with emotional stakes for chaos without being too heavy-handed about its serious themes. This is what sets them apart from a lot of animal games. They’ve put out the game where Untitled Goose Game meets Shadow of the Colossus; “Because it’s a threatening, evil bird,” Fernandez said, “but what if there are emotional dangers underneath?”

In that comparison, the star for which the crystals are collected is the giant. You collect the star’s shiny baubles and are immediately sent to get another one, an interaction that feels increasingly flat and sad — a perfect distraction because it never satisfies.

“You’re trying to achieve some kind of antisocial relationship or activity that never has a positive endpoint, but always leaves you feeling distracted in an avoidant way,” Fernandez said. “It’s the feeling that comes up that what you’re doing isn’t leading somewhere good — there’s a kind of sadness imbued with danger.”

Since the game is non-linear, it is expected that as players collect more trinkets however they choose, the underlying themes will begin to stabilize. It’s a low-pressure way to convey a deeper human experience that players might share with the disaster they were controlling.

“Just seeing someone have some kind of catharsis when they play it, being surprised by its depth, feeling like they recognize themselves and their avoidance in the bird, and see some kind of solution that makes them feel less alone — that’s what I think they’re all looking for,” Fernandez said.