The Magic Circle

A pretty interesting satire on the state of the modern game industry and an interesting free-form puzzle game. The game takes place inside a broken game that is never going to be fixed and you are an entity that has found it's way into the world of the game. You can edit your enemies by going inside their heads and making them your allies, You can control said Allies, make them attack enemies and such. Sometimes you can get a little lost and it can sometimes take a while to figure out what to do but in my opinion that is part of the game's charm. I wholly recommend this game. There are some nice visual flourishes too. For example, the unfinished world is grey and drab but wherever you walk there is a spot of colour beneath you. Your 'Magic Circle' trap looks amazing as well. There is always some amazing thing to look at, some visually creative place in this forsaken world.

Overall a nice little game which pokes some fun at the game development industry. Has some fun and unique game play and puzzles, the only thing that holds it back is it is quite short but I'd still recommend a play through.

I really hate useless _/10 scores, but this platform forces one, so wait until the end for a recommendation on how much you should buy it for, as I feel it to be a more accurate representation of whether the game is, you know... worth it. The magic circle is a... eh'... it's hard to describe with the magic circle is in a word or two, but it WAS developed by Question. The Magic Circle is a game about people making a game. It's about, first and foremost, how they could never finish it, and has a fun but small cast of characters that are a blast to listen to. The gameplay consists of trapping creatures and literally rewriting their code so they can work to complete puzzles or fight for you. It's pulled off rather well, though, like a lot of games, it doesn't run overly well on my PC. The graphics are fun, switching between a black-and-white fantasy world and a System Shock 2 esque sci-fi world. These are both a great time to explore, and the denizens within are a lot of fun to fight and take control of. It's overall a very welcome surprise to have a game like this, though I'd rather it was a bit longer, as it fell into the trap of feeling like a tech demo. A damn good tech demo, but a tech demo none the less. So... is it worth the $20 price tag? I'd say no, but it'd be worth even a 25% reduction on the price.

As others have written, it's a satire on gamedev industry. Arguing game developers, long projects, nothing works, nothing finished etc. You run around an ugly world converting monsters and solving small puzzles. There are some pretty interesting ideas here, e.g. you can change parameters of monsters (like make them your ally, just like that). However, after you've "got it" (like, "ok, this is how bad gamedev is") there isn't much else to see or enjoy but the game drags on. Frankly, i didn't find the narrative funny or even entertaining. It's over-acted daily routine of developers, sitcom-level. For comparison, **** comic strips are much cleverer and funnier, if you want some satire on IT industry in general. Not sure if there is anything like that about game development industry in particular. I'm still giving this game a 6 because of the novelty and the experimental feel of this. Such games are definitely needed.

The Magic Circle wants to be a game about making games. As one of those artsy meta-games, in the game it is a “game within a game”, wherein you are a playtester for a gaming company whose game, the Magic Circle, has been in development hell for the last 20 years. You are quickly introduced to the four main characters. Ish, the pretentious game developer who seems to be riffing on a number of haughty, pretentious game designers. Coda, a fangirl new to the company who has joined the team and is responsible for creating a demo but who is deeply angry about Ish’s failure to deliver a game for so long, and extremely possessive of the game world. Haze, a pro gamer who joined the team ten years ago to try and help Ish understand gamers. And Pro, an AI trapped inside the world, the PC of the previous version of the game which was trashed ten years ago when they started over from scratch. This game is really driven by story, but it suffers from the flaw of everyone being kind of a jerk. The “good guys” are Pro and Haze, and they’re trying to destroy the company around them. It just goes downhill from there. This makes it hard to really like any of them; they’re kind of fun to watch for a bit, but after a while, it just becomes horror heaped upon horror. Moreover, the actual character arcs are fairly limited, and unfortunately, it felt a bit inconsistent at times. The actual gameplay isn’t very good either; in fact, I’d classify it as outright bad. While some of this is intentional meta-badness, it is genuinely not a fun game to play. The gameplay consists of pretty obvious, basic actions. It is definitely not a twitch-based game, and is really centered around solving puzzles with the tools you have. The core of the gameplay – in fact, the ONLY gameplay in the game – is shooting a little magic circle under an enemy. You have tons of time to do this, so this isn’t really hard. Once they’re trapped in your circle, you can strip off all the abilities from the enemy or even make it into your friend so it will attack other enemies for you. This sounds neat, but it is literally the only gameplay mechanic there is. There are a few enemies later on in the game which your dudes cannot attack easily, and which require you to kill them by getting a tractor beam ability to pull them down to be attacked, or to get the railgun ability to shoot them from range. Then, you just do the same thing. These three things – plus the ability to ride around on the back of a fireproof turtle – solve every puzzle in the game. The result, then, is that the gameplay mostly consists of wandering around the game world searching for collectables; you can complete the entire game in under two hours if you’re just trying to beat it, and frankly, the collectibles don’t really add all that much. The puzzles are mostly just “find ability and use it to solve the puzzle”; none of the solutions are ever particularly clever, and almost all of them basically have one or two “pieces” to them. The gameplay is just too straightforward, without anything really to mix things up until the end of the game where you create a little mini-dungeon to send the AI through – which is really very basic and not all that fun to create. As there is no intensity in the actual gameplay itself, and the game world is deliberately drab and ugly (and very monotonous looking after a while), there’s just not much to love here. The story is only okay, it ends up coming off as a bit too caught up in how clever it thinks it is, and the gameplay itself is pretty poor. All in all, I can’t really recommend this. It had some vaguely interesting ideas, but ultimately, not much was done with them, and the moment-to-moment gameplay of the game is just not very engaging.