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).

True to the spirit of chaos implied by the name, the very first thing that the game teaches you is that pecking or striking wooden objects against the shiny, flint-like boulders scattered around the level will set any nearby wood and grass on fire. One of the very first puzzles I solved was to knock a log from a tree (all of which have the Kirby tree face, making you feel a little bad about it), setting it on fire, then using that to bust through a car window and get through to the crystal on its hood.

A lot of the puzzles are solved by setting fire to things, breaking glass with loud noises, or by being very rude to those playing mice (such as smashing their sandcastle to get the shard inside). The game generally revels in satisfying your id for being a little gremlin and causing trouble. I saw other shards that I didn’t collect, and when I went to turn in my 20, a pop-up said that there were 30 in total if I wanted to continue, giving a generous flexibility to ignore any you might have trouble with while providing completionists with more to do.

The interactions were all delightfully playful and surprising, so I expect to be among the latter. The systemic nature of the fire and physics objects elevates it above a simple adventure game to feeling like a light immersive sim, which makes me all the more excited to explore and see what surprises they have in store when the game comes out in full next year.

Bad Magpie

Milktooth

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

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Bad Magpie is a narrative adventure game about a magpie with one wing, a fixation on shiny things, and no interest in connecting the two dots.

—

YOU ARE A MAGPIE

One wing. No flock. One obsession: a fallen star that wants shiny trinkets and nothing else.

Burn a meadow, drain a swimming pool, write off a car… You can’t fly but there are plenty of other ways to navigate the world… and you’re going to try all of them.

Your plan is simple:

Find the trinkets. Win over the star. Cure your loneliness.

—

A WORLD TEEMING WITH SECRETS

Explore a small, densely packed, non-linear open world full of things to peck, steal, combine, and meddle with.

Bad Magpie runs on a delightfully elastic cartoon logic. Screech into a megaphone to shatter glass. Peck flint to spark fires. Drop an apple in oil and see what happens.

Tear through the world in a fury, or carefully sweep every corner leaving no stone unpecked. There’s no dialogue, no text, and no cutscenes. Just a world that rewards anyone curious enough to mess with it.

Every puzzle has multiple solutions. Most of them are intentional.

—

FIND SHINY THINGS

You want the star. The star wants trinkets. But trinkets don’t come free. Not when there’s meteorites to be found.

So what’s the use of wallowing? You have shiny things to find.

—

A MYSTERY DRIVING THE WHOLE THING

You are haunted by a mysterious vision. What is it? Why is it appearing now? And how long will the star keep you distracted from it?

It’s probably nothing.