GoKawiilGood 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.
Milktooth
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.
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