Bad Magpie: The melancholy behind the gleeful anarchy of a new indie game

Amid the gleeful anarchy of Bad Magpie’s debut trailer, there’s a striking note of melancholy. The game’s protagonist – a wounded corvid that creates havoc wherever she goes – calls out forlornly as a flock of her kind passes above, with a conspicuous gap in their formation.

Milktooth games designer and co-founder Daisy Fernandez has had this particular image in her head for years. Lying in the grass one afternoon during the 2020 lockdowns, she looked up and saw a V-shaped pattern in the sky, poignantly incomplete. “It really stuck with me,” she says. “I posted about it online and someone told me about a ‘missing man’ formation, which is an aerial salute to a fallen pilot.”

Already, Fernandez and her then colleagues George Batchelor and Catherine Unger at State of Play Games (South of the Circle) had been batting around ideas for a game of their own. Unger – whose brilliant artwork can currently be seen in SFB Games’ The Mermaid Mask – pitched an idea to the group. “It was a fairytale about a duck that falls in love with a star and goes on a quest to bring it gifts,” Batchelor says. “This was 2019, and because the duck was white …”

The implication is clear. Any game featuring a mischievous bird was always going to draw comparisons to Untitled Goose Game, but back then the visual resemblance to House House’s Bafta winner encouraged the team to consider a different path. The star and the central quest remained, but as time went by it was clear that a magpie was a much better fit for a story about a character seeking out shiny objects as a distraction from her abandonment issues. They may have had to reverse-engineer it, Fernandez says, but it has come to feel like the ideal choice: “You know, ‘One for sorrow, two for joy …’ – that almost sounds like an anthem for the co-dependent.”

The game, then, is designed to be something of a collectathon – one that could be read as a meta-commentary on the way games distract us from broader existential worries. And not just in the playing, either. “One thing George and I talk about quite a bit is that making a game is the best form of avoidance, because there are endless tasks you can throw yourself into,” Fernandez says, cheerfully adding that her death anxiety “is the quietest it’s ever been” as development continues.

All of which risks making a game in which you set fields of flowers aflame, launch fireworks through car windows and chase a frowning computer monitor with a trumpet in your beak, sound awfully serious. Yet there’s a thrilling through-line of experimental chaos, that Batchelor says has been somewhat inspired by Zelda: Breath of the Wild. “It means we do get some surprising outcomes,” he says. “And some surprisingly inefficient outcomes,” Fernandez quips.

That has led to a few happy accidents, as the studio builds a sandbox that feels truly reactive to the player’s input, bolstered by Eli Rainsberry’s deft audio design that gives each object its own sonic palette. “We’re testing the whole time, so we get to see what [players] want to do and try to accommodate that – or at least make a joke that gestures at it,” Batchelor says. For all that the scope has crept, there have been a few judicious cuts: a keenness to “degoosify” the game, as Fernandez puts it, led to a model village being removed, House House having got there first.

They needn’t have worried. Bad Magpie is very much its own bird – not least thanks to its higher dynamic tonal range. “There’s this expression in screenwriting that if you want to make someone laugh, you make them cry first, and vice versa,” Fernandez says. “Pixar’s so good at that – every time there’s a devastating moment there’s a slapstick beat seconds later, and you’re so relieved to laugh.” Batchelor nods in agreement: “People really picked up on that emotional beat of seeing the magpie alone. Just that one shot helped validate how it’s going to feel in the final game.”