An upcoming Aussie game makes you an angry magpie and everyone’s problem.
Clicking around on Reddit the other day, as I am want to do when enjoying a bit of no-thoughts-head-empty time, I checked in on the r/Australian subreddit. There, I found a clip of a most Australian game. It’s a game so deeply Aussie that I immediately followed the dev on socials and asked if they’d like to chat sometime.
The game is Pie in the Sky (a fantastic title), in which you play an Australian magpie that likes to divebomb people. It sits in the extremely unexplored conceptual space between Untitled Goose Game and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
Observe this excellent, in-development footage:
It’s all there, right? You can see the influence of THPS on this thing; specific moves have names and create a score multiplier in the screen’s lower third. There are collectibles like floating letters (they appear to spell WING, though I think it should be SWOOP, to really match the old SKATE collectibles) and feathers. There are in-world breakables like sand castles. It’s a clever flip on existing, well-trodden territory.
Even making a game about a magpie inspired by Tony Hawk is, in and of itself, a subtle dad joke so rock solid I must stand in awe of it.
But you also get to annoy people, a time-honoured video game activity and in a way that every Australian will instantly recognise. You play an angry maggie dive-bomb people on bicycles. You steal their burritos. You shit on people from a great height (a mechanic explored by other local bird-based games like The Godfeather).
It’s very silly, and I’m already fully bought in. Pie in the Sky is being produced by Monster Shop Games. It obviously does not yet have a release date. You can follow Monster Shop on Twitter here, wishlist Pie in the Sky on Steam here, and have a squiz at their previous game, Dungeon Merchant, on Steam.
Image: Aleksandar Nakic, burroblando, iStock, Kotaku Australia
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