The Magic Circle (PC)
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.
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 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. 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. Here is where the game really begins, as you must play The Magic Circle to help direct the fate of its in-game counterpart.
The way you interact with the game world is fairly interesting, your ability to influence it tied to the nature of coding and memory. 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. 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. 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.
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. To solve these puzzles often involves tinkering with the AI or traits of things you find. 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. 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. Floating rocks, flying keys, teleporting mushrooms, there’s room for unusual combinations here and it opens up a world of opportunity. 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. 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. 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.
The Magic Circle is an excellent depiction of the potential trials of video game development. The main focus are on three characters closely tied to the fate of the project. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. It is a shame that a lot of it requires uncovering collectables in the game world, so you aren’t likely to get the complete picture unless you invest time in scraping around a fairly bare environment.
The main story, however, manages to maintain its footing fairly well outside the long break it takes for you to move around the game world. The voice cast for our main characters put in a wonderful performance and the game seems to be fairly knowledgeable about aspects of the wider gaming community so it can make properly placed references and observations. There are even some rather cute touches to help you buy the idea that the game is incomplete, such as the music that’s piped in having conductor notes audible. Even though the core of The Magic Circle certainly seems to be the exploration segment, it does progress further beyond that and introduces a few neat new ways to interact with the creation of a video game, but the story seems to stop a bit abruptly. It conveys its intended message well with the ending, but if it had pushed on a little longer it might have had a more visceral and interactive message rather than merely presenting it to the player for consideration. Taking more advantage of the gaming medium to tell the tale would have added an extra unique layer to the affair that is currently only somewhat present in the game’s design elements.
One thing that might impede some players from engaging with the story is that the messages in the game can often be read as an admonishment of video games, developers, and the player as well. This mostly expresses itself through individual characters speaking though, and a story can bring up concepts it doesn’t agree with just for the sake of consideration. I can see some of its messages being contentious, and the game does certainly depict a negative extreme of game development, but consideration of a character’s intended role in the story should soften some seemingly harsh critiques while still giving a useful eye at an actual possible side of game creation.
THE VERDICT: The Magic Circle is quite nearly a tragedy, the unfortunate tale of how games and the people who make them can go awry, ruining the things the developers once dreamed of creating. It can be cynically biting, but it’s not like we’re looking at the creation of your typical game here. When a movie turns the lens on a director or a book covers an author character, outside of biographies, it’s usually to show the struggles creators face in the medium, and The Magic Circle is doing the same for video game creation. Its main thread is certainly well constructed for the task, but it’s ancillary parts are a bit flimsy and the game’s scope too small to dig in as deep as it could have.
And so, I give The Magic Circle for PC…
A GOOD rating. The Magic Circle is a compelling tale of a group of developers who embody different parts of the game development community, its world a representation of the turmoil of conflicting creativity, and its messages strong enough to potentially turn off people who aren’t open to them. It is a game with obvious layers to peel back rather than vague imagery or weak discussion points, but The Magic Circle’s strength of concept isn’t able to carry every part of its design. The gameplay looks like a playground for creative puzzle solutions and unique interaction with the world but it’s given very little to do. To try and extract a bit more functionality from its coding mechanics, interesting audio and text logs were hidden from the player, sacrificing a bit of the story’s substance for the sake of eking out more from a side of the game that wasn’t very robust. Funnily enough, a bit more development time could have been spent fine-tuning that system and giving it more substantial challenges, or the game could have more closely focused on the narrative so it could ride on the strength of that alone.
The analysis of constructing art and the exploration of the double-edged nature of creativity are important to have in any media as it opens things up to more thoughtful growth. The Magic Circle executed those goals fairly well, and while it’s not the kind of metatextual critique that will reshape the entire medium, it does create a situation for consideration without trying to be coy about it and obstructing it behind an otherwise unrelated game. The Magic Circle is a think piece on game development, and because of that, the subjectivity of a player’s reaction will inform much of their opinion on the game. The conveyance of that message is fairly sound although the construction of the game is pretty basic, but it does at least serve as a proper platform for getting the ideas out there. It is a clash between the views of the creators and the views of the player, and your opinions coming out of that confrontation will determine whether or not you will embrace this game.