![]() Through their conversations, the audio logs, and development notes we find scattered around the world, we are given a closer look at the issues inherent in unrestrained creativity, entitled fandom, disillusionment with a project, and other themes that play into both the artistic and functional side of creating an interactive experience. Coupled with the rogue AI “Old Pro” who represents the sort of “spirit” of the game, and you’ve got a cast that covers most of the important bases of development in a concise package. ![]() The monkey wrench into this stagnant development is not you though, but a new member of the team called Coda, a passionate fan of Ish’s early work who now has the opportunity to work on the new game. His long time assistant Maze represents a more business focused character, a now disillusioned fan of Ish who is trapped into working on this project and represents the desires of the other employees where their work is underappreciated and misunderstood. Ish is the main focus of this tale, the aging auteur visionary whose need for perfection and desire to explore complex ideas has caused the game to undergo a bevy of changes that arrest its development. The main focus are on three characters closely tied to the fate of the project. The Magic Circle is an excellent depiction of the potential trials of video game development. It is a joy to cook up a plan and see it work in action, the game simply doesn’t have enough areas to challenge that side of things, instead focusing mostly on its story. It’s a system with a lot of potential depth but not much room to use it in, a design decision that is almost justified because you’re meant to be in a barely constructed game world but one that still feels like it could have given you more to do. Sadly, there are maybe 5 or 6 puzzles total in the game that require any sort of creative use of the code, and most its purpose seems to be gradually recruiting an army of the game world’s enemies to take down whatever dangerous creature shuffles into your path. Floating rocks, flying keys, teleporting mushrooms, there’s room for unusual combinations here and it opens up a world of opportunity. You can strip traits from one thing and add them into another, the composition of the object not needing to match reality in any way. Coding isn’t that complicated in the game world, as soon as you trap a target and take a look at what makes it tick, you’ll see an easy to read bit of text that has a few variables you can swap around to give the target new traits or behaviors. To solve these puzzles often involves tinkering with the AI or traits of things you find. While a lot of The Magic Circle is about walking around and listening to the story unfold, there are enough tasks scattered around the hollow game world for you to have things to do and puzzles to solve. I wouldn’t say this is actually a positive mission, the whole idea is to wrench the game from its creators’ hands so it may have some hope of reaching a finished state, but the mechanics for doing so fit the task at hand, especially once you start trapping objects and creatures and open up their code. Nothing is truly deleted in The Magic Circle, so finding ways to work with the shadows of the past will help you work towards giving the game a future. The first tool the game gives you is the concept of filling objects, your player avatar able to restore deleted objects due to the remnants of their code that linger in the environment. The way you interact with the game world is fairly interesting, your ability to influence it tied to the nature of coding and memory. Here is where the game really begins, as you must play The Magic Circle to help direct the fate of its in-game counterpart. Things look bleak for this game, but things take a turn for the fanciful when an AI from a scrapped build of the title appeals to you to make sure SOMETHING comes from this long ailing project. There are hardly any colors in the environment, multiple placeholder objects, and the developers themselves will constantly bicker in front of you, tweaking and removing features live as you play. Putting you in the role of a playtester asked to test a fictional game that’s been stuck in development for 20 years, you’ll very quickly realize that almost no progress has been made on the project. There are films about the directing process, books about the struggles of being an author, and with The Magic Circle, video games now turn the perspective back in on themselves to explore the world of video game development.
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