"A densely-packed open world game about death anxiety": Bad Magpie's avian mischief channels a lot of heartache

How lockdown and Untitled Goose Game shaped Milktooth's debut project

Do they sing the song, where you are from? One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy… I wouldn't put it past magpies themselves to have learned this superstitious ditty. They've got a sharp ear for the human voice, after all, and studies indicate that they can count.

Perhaps they're even using the rhyme to mess with us. According to folklore, if you see one magpie, you can trill "Hello Mr Magpie, how is your lady wife" to chase away the prophesied sorrow. Being a creature of perpetual worry, I mutter this Victorian cantrip everytime I spy a pie, skidding over the road with a machine-gun cackle. Then, a second bird materialises from behind a bush, flanking me like one of her velociraptor ancestors, and I feel like I'm being trolled. "I used to do the exact same thing myself," comments Milktooth co-founder and design director Daisy Fernandez, "but it ended up becoming impractical now that I look at a magpie pretty much all day, every day."

Milktooth's debut game Bad Magpie leans into the brilliance and pathos of a beautiful, sociable, cunning bird that is especially burdened by symbolism and projection. As described on Steam, it casts you as a magpie with one wing, hopping about a comedic, "handcrafted world" of multiple-solution puzzles and improbable wildlife - a realm of fireworks, sewer tentacles, glass-shattering megaphones, and mice footballers that reminds me of both Animal Well and Donut County. The magpie mourns her missing flock, but she finds distraction in the shape of a fallen star: a soft, cold presence in a crater, like a crashlanded Totoro. The star craves shiny trinkets. The magpie is happy to go scrounging around for them. It beats being sad and lonely, after all.

The related puzzles follow an "elastic" cartoon logic, which celebrates impulsiveness. Go on, you beady little goblin - try sticking a fork into an electricity socket. Go strike sparks from a boulder, to light a field on fire. If you've read this far, you probably know that real-life magpies are excellent problem-solvers and tool users. A lot of people love them for this, but I think what I've seen of Bad Magpie does a good job of whimsically expressing the associated knack for destruction.

Bad Magpie could qualify as a 'cosy game', I guess. Also from its Steam page, the game's corvid meddling and hoarding are helped along by a wealth of "ASMR tactile interactions", "every peck, pull, and prod" being "designed with maximum juiciness in mind". But the buffet of balmy brainpops is engagingly soured by the game's characterisation of collection as a way of avoiding, or perhaps processing, anguish.

It wasn't going to be a magpie game, at first – certainly, it was never envisaged as an Untitled Magpie Game, whatever screenshot comparisons may suggest. "Back in 2019, [Milktooth co-founder and art director] Catherine Unger first shared some sketches with me and [co-founder and technical director] George Batchelor of a white duck who falls in love with a fallen star," Fernandez recalls. "Shortly after that, Untitled Goose Game was announced... so we went back to the drawing board."

The three developers settled on a magpie specifically in light of the 'One for sorrow' rhyme, which dates back to the 1700s. "George and I were also both reading Irvine Yalom's book Love's Executioner, which explores things like codependency and death anxiety," Fernandez explains, "and we thought the magpie rhyme could be read as an expression of exactly that." I haven't read Love's Executioner, myself, so I can't speak to the structural parallels here, but magpies suit the theme in other ways: they grieve, or do something corresponding to grief. (So do geese, as it happens.)

The premise of a flightless magpie who has lost her flock cohered early on in the Covid pandemic. "During lockdown I was lying in the grass looking at the clouds, and saw a flock of birds flying overhead in a 'missing man formation', and knew we had to get that image into the game," Fernandez says. "Having a grounded magpie also turned out to be a really useful technical and design constraint.

"The star in Catherine's original concept art was shiny, so once our protagonist became a magpie, her fixation on the star made total sense," she goes on. "From there the gameplay loop also fell into place, as a collectathon felt like the perfect genre for an avoidant magpie obsessed with shiny things."

The commonplace belief that magpies fixate on shiny things isn't supported by science. I suspect the devs know this, mind: Bad Magpie is picking and choosing animal folklore to lightly, sympathetically spoof the consumptive habits encouraged by many videogames, getting into the other feelings that may drive them. As Fernandez puts it, "the endless checklists and counters of the genre can themselves be a form of distraction/escapism for players. And then there's the final bit of irony... that making a densely-packed open world game about death anxiety has been a really effective way of sublimating my own."

Bad Magpie's exploration of abandonment and mortality is "part of something broader and on-going for me", she acknowledges, but the game isn't literal autobiography or memoir. "Each of us was going through some kind of loss around the time we first started coming up with the game," Fernandez observes. "and we wanted to tell an allegorical story rather than a specific one, so that players can interpret it in whatever way feels personal to them."

I've written in the past about my aversion to open world checklists, so I'm really happy to see the idea of checklist reconsidered as an expressive structure, here. I really like how the game hints at collectionism as a kind of singsong accounting, rather than just the toneless and robotic filling of boxes: eight for a wish, nine for a kiss, ten a [buried Korok seed] you should be careful not to miss… It makes me want to go back and apply the rhyme to open world games I've hated.

Notwithstanding Fernandez's account of its development, Bad Magpie seems at risk of being written off as an Untitled Goose clone - I haven't even mentioned the dynamic score, which responds to your pranks and eggs you on. Still, it's trying for trickier emotions than the 2019 hit, while dipping into a more fantastical vein of mischief. Look out for it in 2027.