‘This is a love letter to games’: First look at Davide Soliani’s Game Awards surprise, Bradley the Badger
Former Mario Rabbids devs Day 4 Night reveal their gaming satire, which takes on Bloodborne, Cyberpunk, and more
“If Half-Life 3 goes out at the same time as our game, after 20 years of people waiting… we lose with the best.”
Without knowing all of its secret announcements in advance, it’s difficult for anyone to predict the highlights of any Game Awards. But sat in my hotel room across the street from the Peacock Theatre on the morning of show day, I was convinced Day 4 Night’s debut project, Bradley the Badger, would be one of 2025’s most memorable reveals – even if, by the time you read this, Valve has done the unimaginable.
Bradley is a colorful action-adventure game from Mario Rabbids creative director Davide Soliani and Red Dead Redemption writer Christian Cantamessa, who formed Day 4 Night last year, along with other former leaders of Ubisoft Milan, including Mario Rabbids producers Cristina Nava and Gian Marco Zanna.
Before it was announced at The Game Awards on Thursday, the project was boldly described by investor (and co-creator of Xbox) Ed Fries as “easily the most creative thing we have seen in quite some time” – and after glimpsing the first gameplay, I can absolutely see where he’s coming from.
Though it wears its influences on its sleeve – Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Portal, and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, to name a few – as a composition, Bradley the Badger is one of the most unique concepts I can remember seeing in this genre in a long time. The game sees the titular omnivore – a platforming mascot from the past voiced by X-Men’s Evan Peters – sent on a mind-bending video game pastiche, across a variety of gaming parodies poking lighthearted fun at Bloodborne and The Last of Us, as he attempts to find his way home.
It’s a satire of modern video game development, with live action sequences appearing to feature an all-powerful game developer driving the plot forward, and worlds like ‘BadgerBorne’, ‘CyberBadger’, and ‘The Last Badger’. These environments are full of unfinished assets and ‘bugs’ that at first glance I assumed were typical blemishes that come with in-development game demos, but are actually gameplay features that Bradley can use and manipulate.
Satire is well-established in film and TV, but we don’t often see video games poke fun at themselves in the same way, especially not with the level of confidence and imagination on show in Bradley’s reveal trailer.
“This is a love letter to video games, to the industry, but also to the people that are making games,” Soliani told VGC. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously, and we want the people to love and enjoy what we are proposing.”
“The film and television industry has a long history now of parody and satire,” added Cantamessa. “In Hollywood, they call it navel-gazing, but it’s healthy, it’s humorous, it’s fun. It opens up some of the dusty closets to the audience, which always has an interest in how the sausage is made.
“The games industry has been so secretive and so weird about the whole process. Then on top of that, I think we are mature enough as an industry to understand all the genres we have, the big personalities that we encounter, and the weird foibles that make this industry so fascinating.
“This is a love letter to video games, to the industry, but also to the people that are making games”
“I think that if the TV industry is ready for The Studio, and the film industry has Birdman, the comic book industry has Deadpool… I think the games industry is ready for a healthy dose of satire.”
Bradley the Badger’s core gag is also its most interesting gameplay feature. The mascot discovers the game development kit in an intersection between the real world and the game world, and it allows him to manipulate and utilize the many ‘unfinished assets’ around the game worlds.
In one scene Soliani and Cantamessa showed VGC, Bradley was able to solve a puzzle in multiple ways by moving around these physics objects, making them bigger or smaller, or even transforming into them, and rolling and hopping around, Banjo-Kazooie-style.
Later in the game, the co-directors explain, players will learn how to change the properties of objects, further enhancing the systemic gameplay they’re going for with Bradley. Unfinished assets can be made sticky so that Bradley can climb them, for example, or turned explosive and used to destroy the environment or enemies. Players will also be able to ‘debug’ unfinished elements of the world, like NPCs or chests, so that they then become usable.
How have you managed co-directing the game?
Soliani: First of all, we are dynamic guys. We argue, we bicker, and we discuss a lot. But on top of that, I want to add that if I can work with [composer] Grant Kirkhope and survive, I can work with anyone! All the decisions fall upon us two, but also the other founders and the team, and it’s a very warm environment we are in. We truly believe in the strength of our team.
You are big Rare fans. What influences did you take from their games?
Actually, we were playing Banjo one hour ago! For us, games like those and the Rareware of that time, the mid to late 90s, it’s sort of like an oasis. We were already making games then, but we were looking at their output and the bar kept going up. We would love to steal some of that lightning in a bottle that they had in that period. And they’re a great company now, their output speaks for itself.
A lot of those classic games were made by tight teams. Are you wary of keeping small?
Soliani: I’m absolutely conscious about it. We are a family, we are a very focused team. All of them basically are the team that worked with me for more than 20 years for some of them. We have been through everything, so it’s family.
Cantamessa: Another example that I bring up is the Grand Theft Auto 3 team. I was fortunate enough to join DMA Design in the last six, seven months of GTA 3 and I just got to fundamentally play that game and do a little bit of advanced QA. I was exposed to that core small team of like 30, 35 people.
Seeing the synergy of everybody just playing the game, coming up with ideas, putting that in the game, stay small… You can just feel it. There is like an electricity in the air and our game feels a little bit, to me, emotional like those days where you were just playing the game and you were going, ‘oh wow, I can do this, I can do that, this is awesome’.
“It’s important to tell you that this game is systemic,” explained Soliani. “We want players to always find their own solutions, even a solution that we are not yet aware of as developers, to solve any problem.
“So if I transfer myself inside an apple, I will roll around as an apple. I can scale myself up and become a giant apple, and roll around destroying parts of the environment, or squash enemies. Instead of scaling it up, I could scale down myself and sneak into places where otherwise Bradley’s body wouldn’t be able to fit.”
“This creates a very sandbox-y style of gameplay,” added Cantamessa. If I were to take two games and kind of mash them together, I would say this is Mario meets Portal: A super fun platform action adventure, with puzzle solving and systemic gameplay.”
One of the most intriguing elements of Bradley’s Game Awards reveal is, of course, those live-action sequences, which will also feature actor Evan Peters. Day 4 Night isn’t revealing much about them so far, but Cantamessa – whose credits include some of the industry’s biggest triple-A narratives – promises a heartfelt story that he feels “very personal” about.
“We are not saying too much as of now about the live action component other than it will be an integral part of the game, and of course an integral part of the storytelling,” Cantamessa said.
“Because the game is a satire of video games, you can probably guess the role that live action can play in this kind of story. And I’m also giving you some movie examples when I quote Wreck-It Ralph or The Lego Movie… these stories that you can enjoy with your kids, but maybe you, as an adult, get a couple of extra layers. I don’t want to say much more than that.
“If you check the trailer again, then you will see some hints. At this stage, we’d love for people to take their read of the story. We just want to have fun with the audience, with potential players.
“We’re still working on the game, so it’s too early to give a full picture of everything, and some things are better left to the game itself as well. But I think the trailer contains a lot of the ingredients that are necessary… to interpret it and decode it a little bit.”
Right now, Day 4 Night says it’s seeking a publisher to help bring Bradley the Badger to more platforms beyond the announced PC version. By the time you’re reading this, if its debut trailer has gone down as well in the Peacock Theatre as it did in my Los Angeles hotel room, I can’t imagine their phones will remain silent for long.
