As you move around the broken world you can pick up emails and post it notes from the developers that are really funny it’s good to hear about the lack of funding or the lack of overall purpose of what they are trying to achieve.
It really does question the “who’s really in control” message here and there are some brilliant insights into how games are made, developed and marketed. The main thrust of the dialogue is witty, very meta and thought provoking. Story and writing wise there is a lot to like here. The rest of the gameplay found in The Magic Circle is a mixture of puzzle solving and exploration, something which keeps moving the story forward towards the final goal. This is the most innovative, unusual and clever device I’ve seen in a game for many a year. You can’t actually perform attacks yourself, so you have to be cunning to defeat any enemy, sending trapped creatures to fight your battles or send them off to find hidden paths unavailable to you. You can make it weak or strong etc.…this is a very nice feature that gives you a host of possibilities to play with. You can make the creature follow you around, doing your bidding as your ally, or you can steal their abilities and use them on other items or creatures. Now here’s the clever thing…when said item is trapped you can then enter into the “code” of the item, monster or creature and change their game settings or powers. This life force gives you the ability to trap items. There’s a jump button and a button for gaining life force. The controls are pretty straight forward as you move around in first person. Is this the end? No it’s just the beginning because a strange glitch in the game starts talking to you and tells you the only way forward is to break the game itself. Then, just as soon as you’re done, the developers show you an unfinished final cut scene and the credits roll. As you progress further you see that the textures are shoddy and lumpy, the graphics haven’t be cultured and are still pencil drawn. This sums up the nature and tone of The Magic Circle completely and utterly. You might try a door to a straw hut only to be told in post it note form that this area isn’t ready yet and they haven’t enough time or resources to make it happen. You hear voices in the background trying to act out the scene but they break into heated discussions about what should happen next. You’re then placed in the classic RPG burning village scene with a first person view and are escaping through the village. Then the voice-over turns into an argument between the developers of the game. You start by listening and watching a loading scene for a grand adventure with a dramatic voice-over. It’s about game publishing, game developers, game betas and the gamer. Well The Magic Circle: Gold Edition is all about a broken unfinished game – one in which you are the tester trapped like a ghost within the machine.
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