This adorable upcoming platformer is a love letter to video games where the world is broken by design: "If players can imagine an approach and the mechanics support it, it’ll probably work"

Self-aware games that acknowledge their existence as video games are something of a rarity. Off the top of my head, last year's Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 is one of the newer names on that incredibly brief list. It makes sense – lean into the shtick too much, and a game becomes unfun. Don't interact with those themes enough, and the self-referentialism loses its potency.

Bradley the Badger developer Day 4 Night knows how tricky that balance can be. "The Kit lets players interact with any unfinished asset in the game the way a developer would," the studio tells GamesRadar+ of the tools that Bradley – cute and fluffy badger and star of his broken-by-design platformer – has at his disposal. "Our announce trailer shows a few abilities that Bradley will acquire, and there will be more to be revealed. The Kit is designed to be systemic, so there’s rarely a single 'right' solution. If players can imagine an approach and the mechanics support it, it’ll probably work."

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Bradley the Badger is yet to receive a firm release window, but it's still one of our most wanted games of 2026. It's gorgeous, for one, with a vibrant art style and clever framework that proves it one of most inventive new titles on the horizon.

But my excitement isn't purely down to that – I'm also drawn to how surprisingly deep it is. The developer describes this charming upcoming platformer as "a love letter to the video game industry and the people who make games," according to Day 4 Night. "What inspires us is the continual reinvention of video games as an art form."

At the same time, it acknowledges how its creatively colorful mascot-like character, not to mention all the eccentricities that come with Bradley's world, have a flavor of Banjo-Kazooie developer Rare's early days.

"We love that era and we are honored to be mentioned next to a company that was a creative beacon for us during our formative years in the industry," says a spokesperson for the studio.

"But Bradley isn’t about recreating a specific studio or title. It’s about that feeling we had when we fell in love with this art form in the first place. It’s both a fun action-adventure and a story about video games, self-discovery, and the creative process with the hurdles that comes with it."

And hurdles, there will be many. Bradley the Badger sees players tasked with using The Kit to mend broken digital worlds, delivering a "genre-bending" action adventure with plenty of heart. Some levels look more horror themed, as per the Steam page, with hundreds of hands reaching out from a dark cave interior. Others look a lot more like Cyberpunk 2077's Night City, or the ramshackle medieval environs of a town in the Witcher 3, and there's even a fun reference to Bloodborne.

"Our approach to levels is to consider them a sandbox, a creative space for the players," the studio tells us of what we can expect from Bradley's world.

"We design environments to be a container of challenges, inviting players to be inventive rather than simply solve fixed puzzles and traverse the space. The Kit forces us to think less about guiding players down a path and more about giving them a playground and a tool to be creative," Day 4 Night hints, which I can only take to mean that we can expect a degree of playful creativity in Bradley the Badger we might not find elsewhere.

As both an ode to the craft of game development and a colorful, zany platformer, there's lots to love about Bradley despite how much we've yet to learn. Even if Day 4 Night takes its sweet time in delivering the goods, potentially hanging onto Bradley until 2027 or beyond, something tells me the wait will be worth it. I mean, just look at his little face!