Bad Magpie develops the bad-bird canon with more tools in a weirder world

Amid the lavishly detailed third-person gore of the larger summer showcases, the debut of Bad Magpie in the Xbox showcase was a welcome change: a cartoony style, cheery colours and a heartstring-tugging tableau of an injured bird left behind by its flock, with a slightly demonic twist when said bird picked up a burning log and torched its bucolic environment. 

Having played it, I can confirm that the game is more or less exactly what it looks like: a mildly unhinged approximation of Untitled Goose Game which gives its titular bird some more inventive puzzles and a series of tools with which to solve them. And there is quite a lot of setting things on fire, too, at least in the section I played. 

It quickly becomes apparent that Bad Magpie is a more fantastical affair than House House’s debut. While the goose had a perfectly-animated strut across a perfectly stereotypical English village, the magpie has a relentless hop through a more peculiar setting. Flowers wear beatific smiles, trees wear blank faces, cheery rodents gather to play, and the narrative calls for you to collect meteorite shards for a fallen star, to be delivered care of some sort of alien serpent protruding from a playground sandpit. Developer Milktooth is a new studio but one-third of it is George Batchelor, creator of Hot Date and Far From Noise, so there is a solidly whimsical pedigree.

The shards are scattered around an open-ish environment, but reaching them requires steadily more elaborate scheming. The magpie has four options – hop, peck, swing or squawk – and the basic tool in its arsenal is fire. Peck a tree to cause some logs to drop, then grab a log and beat it on a flint to set it in fire. You then have a short time period to torch available problems, such as burning wooden obstacles or beating in the window of a parked car. This is done with rapid swings and goofy sound effects to deliver just the right touch of comedy. 

Advancing further reveals some light platforming to scale scaffolding and gain entrance to a school building. The magpie’s basic hop is very limited, so the challenge is not traversing platforms but working out how to get there. Having solved that, the next main puzzle is an abstract flip into a pile of CRT screens; break and enter and the magpie becomes a pixelated version of itself on screen, traversing each of them in turn to retrieve a loudhailer that transforms from pixel to practical form when you emerge.

The loudhailer turbo-charges the magpie’s squawk to the point where it can shatter glass, enabling access to meteorite shards previously trapped in cabinets, and a newfound ability to annoy mice and other creatures in the world. The discovery is swiftly followed by another puzzle that requires you to extend a giant floor keyboard and play a series of notes by dragging items onto them, which then unlocks the next door.  

Casting around turns up a series of similarly varied puzzles ranged around the school premises, most of which have a collectible shard in clear view. Sometimes it’s simply a case of finding a path through, sometimes it’s a case of hopping back and forth with the right combination of items. The combinations aren’t complicated - I quickly realised that I could position loose fireworks and return with a burning stick to light them, thus blowing holes in things - and the magpie’s repertoire of actions is broad enough to give some variety but limited enough that I didn’t get stuck. 

The serpent demanded 20 of 30 shards to complete the mission, and I accumulated 23 without too much frustration; if I’d had the time I would have happily spent it worrying away at the handful of remaining spots that seemed to have collectible potential, or annoying the NPC mice by blasting them with the megaphone. It’s a soothing series of puzzles that feel slightly deeper, more creative and more anarchic than the pastoral idyll of Goose Game, in a way that I suspect will be well-received by kids, with the potential to wander deeper into fantasy as the game continues. I won’t go so far as to say it’s the dickheaded-bird game to beat this year - the Steam release slate moves too fast for that - but it’s a very strong contender.