Bad Magpie is an upcoming game about a lonely, injured magpie who causes comic chaos while trying to fill the emotional void left by her absent flock. Its developers at Milktooth combine slapstick destruction with themes of abandonment, co-dependency and existential anxiety, aiming to give the game an emotional undercurrent beneath its anarchic premise.

The idea grew from designer Daisy Fernandez seeing an incomplete V-shaped bird formation during the 2020 lockdowns, later associating it with a “missing man” salute. The team moved from an earlier duck-and-star fairy tale to a magpie, whose attraction to shiny objects suited a collectathon about distraction; players can burn flower fields, fire fireworks through car windows and experiment in a reactive sandbox influenced partly by Zelda: Breath of the Wild.