Bad Magpie Is a Delightful Game About Destructively Avoiding Your Emotions
Key takeaways
- 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.
- "So it's like, what if a magpie had these weird attachment issues."
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.