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