Summary
- Bad Magpie comes out next year for XBOX Series X|S, XBOX on PC, cloud, and included with Game Pass. Play it on both console and PC at no additional cost with XBOX Play Anywhere.
- You are a magpie, separated from its family because you lost the ability to fly, trying to win the favor of a disinterested fallen star with shiny trinkets.
- Gameplay involves exploration, puzzle solving, and light immersive sim elements as you set fires, break glass, and generally cause chaos wherever you go.
The immediately appealing pitch of Bad Magpie – a world premiere from developer Milktooth in the XBOX Games Showcase – is right there in the title. Be a bird; cause trouble. Like their fellow corvids, crows and ravens, magpies are particularly intelligent and curious birds, with a reputation for stealing shiny things. Amorally creating problems for everyone around them in pursuit of collecting arbitrary treasures? Magpies sound like gamers to me.
In the roughly half-hour demo I got to play, you have been injured and separated from your fellow magpies (like a murder of crows, apparently it’s “a mischief of magpies” – delightful), since you can only hop around instead of flying, with a little band-aid cross on one of your wings. You meet and become obsessed with a fallen star, and at its demand go seek shiny trinkets to earn its favor.
The game is presented in lovely 3D isometric minimalism, a little like Untitled Goose Game, but with a pixelated fuzziness and cell shading that gives it a lovely, painterly softness all its own. Untitled Goose Game is the obvious comparison in concept as well, as a sort of simple adventure game about being a rude bird, though where that game felt grounded in realism as you terrorized the quaint little populated hamlet, here people are pointedly absent (at least so far) and there’s an interesting element of magical realism that kept me unsure of what to expect next at any given moment.
You start on a section of road and make your way into what looks like an abandoned human schoolyard, populated by mice playing like children (building sandcastles, drawing on the pavement with chalk, etc.) When you do find the trinket, a huge serpent with jeweled rings around its neck snatches it and demands you find 20 of the meteorite shards scattered around the area nearby from when the star fell.
The shards were distributed behind simple environmental puzzles. You have three actions: chirping, pecking/picking something up, and contextually interacting with whatever object you’ve picked up (such as shaking a soda can or chirping into a megaphone).
