Rock Paper Shotgun previews Bad Magpie, the debut game from studio Milktooth, following its world premiere trailer at the Xbox Games Showcase 2026. The game is an open-world collectathon that dresses cosy, tactile puzzle-solving in weightier themes of grief, abandonment and death anxiety, casting the player as a one-winged magpie who has lost her flock. It matters as an example of a familiar genre — the checklist-driven collectathon — being reworked into an expressive vehicle for exploring loss.

Players hop around a handcrafted, comedic world of multiple-solution puzzles and improbable wildlife, gathering shiny trinkets for a fallen star that has crashed into a crater. The developers — co-founders Daisy Fernandez, Catherine Unger and George Batchelor — trace the concept to 2019 sketches of a duck and a fallen star, pivoting to a magpie after Untitled Goose Game was announced and drawing on the "One for sorrow" rhyme and Irvine Yalom's book Love's Executioner. The grounded, flightless magpie idea took shape during the Covid lockdown, and the team deliberately made the story allegorical rather than autobiographical so players can read their own losses into it.