Good video games obscure their emotional underpinnings with satisfying gameplay, however the perfect allow you to be a bit bastard when you do it.
Unhealthy Magpie, the debut recreation from London-based indie studio Milktooth, follows the proud custom of gamers controlling animals committing misdemeanor chaos, like Untitled Goose Recreation. They’re joyful workout routines in slicing free and making life minorly worse for everybody else. However there is a thematic throughline to Unhealthy Magpie that ties into a really human expertise.
“The thought [for Bad Magpie] got here out of a really unhappy place: One in every of us was going by heartbreak, one other of us had a loss in our household, and we thought it will be attention-grabbing to have a recreation that is not allegory for that grief however, specifically, the avoidance popping out of grief, not having the ability to withstand an emotional reality,” stated Daisy Fernandez, design director at Milktooth.
The thought of a magpie — a corvid that is cousin to crows and identified for playfulness in addition to utilizing instruments — desperately amassing shiny issues to keep away from its abandonment was a compelling conceit for Fernandez and her colleagues at Milktooth.
“There’s this saying in British folklore — it’d simply be basic folklore, I am unsure — however ‘One for sorrow, two for pleasure.’ So, the concept being that for those who see one magpie, it is dangerous luck, for those who see two, it is good luck,” Fernandez stated. “So it is like, what if a magpie had these bizarre attachment points.”
Hours after Xbox’s trailer showcase the weekend of Summer time Recreation Fest 2026, I sat all the way down to check out about quarter-hour of Unhealthy Magpie, simply sufficient to get a style of its gameplay and the barest inkling of the emotional beats to return.
The sport had me begin out on a quiet street main as much as a schoolyard. The very first thing the sport had me do was stroll as much as a rock and peck it till it began a fireplace, burning the grass round it — and setting the log I picked up aflame in order that I may torch some path-blocking planks to enter a playground.
The sport is trendy, with a painterly look matching the playfulness of the antics my dangerous fowl is as much as. It is exhausting to remain mad on the varmint, as they appear so cute short-hopping back and forth.
The purpose offered within the demo was to gather prismatically colourful crystals, which have been hidden in timber and lodged in hard-to-reach areas that required some mild environmental puzzle-solving to safe. Most frequently, that meant vandalism or different chicanery, from breaking bottles to screaming at mice by a megaphone.
There have been some pleasant little set items within the demo, from digitalizing the magpie to stroll by a number of displays, recovering stated megaphone, to unrolling an enormous piano pad that required dropping books on particular keys to play a selected chord. It is lighthearted enjoyable whereas the magpie is on a mission amassing crystals for a giant, shiny star — a function that fills the void of abandonment for those who’re paying consideration.
It is a tightrope to stroll, and Milktooth needed to ship pleasant gameplay with emotional stakes to the chaos with out being too heavy-handed about its critical themes. That is their differentiator from a variety of animal video games. They pitched the sport as Untitled Goose Recreation meets Shadow of the Colossus; Fernandez stated, “As a result of yeah, menacing evil fowl, however what if emotional stakes have been beneath it?”
In that comparability, the star you are amassing crystals for is the colossus. You gather shiny trinkets for the star and are instantly despatched out to get one other one, an interplay that feels more and more shallow and unhappy — an ideal distraction as a result of it is by no means satisfying.
“You are making an attempt to satisfy some sort of relationship or delinquent exercise that by no means has a constructive endpoint, however at all times makes you’re feeling distracted in an avoidant manner,” Fernandez stated. “It is the dawning sense of what you are doing is not going someplace good — there is a sort of disappointment that is imbued within the menace.”
Because the recreation is nonlinear, the expectation is that as gamers gather extra trinkets nevertheless they select, the underlying themes will begin settling in. It is a low-pressure technique to convey a deeper humane expertise that gamers would possibly share with the calamity corvid they have been controlling.
“To simply see somebody have some form of catharsis after they play it, and be stunned on the depth of it, to really feel they acknowledge themselves and their avoidance within the fowl, and see some form of decision that leaves them feeling much less alone — that is what I feel all of them are on the lookout for,” Fernandez stated.
