![]() While it falls back on some standard devices, like audio logs, here, they're presented in a way that makes sense: The development studio is bugged, in case anyone working there comes up with an idea that might make them money. With the fast-travel and summoning options, I do think Question Games realized the problem with this lack of guidance, but it can still be irritating when you just want to move on-and absorb the next slice of story.Īnd The Magic Circle's story is definitely one worth telling. ![]() Some of my most frustrating moments with The Magic Circle came when I assumed I'd scoured every inch of the environment, only to watch a YouTube walkthrough-thanks, Early Access-and discover I'd completely missed the one enemy behavior necessary to push me in the right direction. This sense of openness also has its downsides, though. The Magic Circle also sends you into the guts of the titular game's previous version-where things are much more System Shock-y. Thankfully, The Magic Circle provides some pretty useful tools to facilitate puzzle solving: It's incredibly easy to jump to one of several nodes on the map, and anything you've interacted with can instantly be summoned to your side. While the first areas you'll stumble upon contain all the elements you need around the puzzle itself, soon after that, you'll need to be a lot more creative. Essentially, you're trying to find the right assemblage of entities and corresponding behaviors to pull the main "sky bastard" into hacking range, but The Magic Circle doesn't provide much guidance as to where you're supposed to go, and in what order. One of The Magic Circle's greatest strengths lies in how much freedom you're given while digging around in the guts of this unfinished game. And unlike Double Fine's Hack 'n Slash, you don't necessarily need a programmer's mindset to figure things out If you're into tinkering with a game's moving parts, there's lots of fun to be had here. And there's quite a bit of leeway as to how you can solve these puzzles if you need that key sitting on a distant ledge, for instance, you can hack the monster on the ledge to make hostile towards keys-causing it to knock this item into the valley below-or give the key the power to move, and have it hop over to you by tagging it as your ally. Thanks to the help of the rogue AI, if you see another living thing, friendly or hostile, you can hack it to change its behaviors, or simply steal these actions and properties for use in something else. Unlike your average environmental puzzle game, though, you can interact with the inhabitants of this world on some pretty deep levels. This game-within-a-game traps players within The Magic Circle, a decade-in-the-making pet project created by the very Lord British figure, Ishmael Gilder (played with a convincing mix of exasperation and weariness by The Venture Bros.' James Urbaniak.) While you're at first asked to do some basic QA testing during the most desperate minutes of the development cycle's eleventh hour, a rogue AI soon sends you on a much more important mission: spiting the "gods" who trapped him(?) within the confines of unfinished content.Īfter this initial setup, The Magic Circle drops you into its sandboxy world, with "taking out the sky bastards" as your overlying goal. These are the issues explored by The Magic Circle, an environmental puzzle game by Question Games, a development team that-as you probably guessed-has plenty of experience with AAA game development, with some of its members having worked on titles like BioShock and Dishonored. When you get right down to it, it's a wonder why anyone wants to be a part of this business in the first place. Then we have the consumers and their demands often well-intentioned, but just as often without the knowledge of how things are actually done. Though several developers fail to make the cut with the coming of each new hardware generation, the HD era has been particularly dire, forcing teams to grow exponentially to overcome new challenges-leaving one poor sap in charge of perpetual cat-herding for years on end. The past five years alone are littered with horror stories about studios falling on their swords after a single project gone wrong. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.Įven if you only follow the industry tangentially, it should be crystal clear that making video games can be an incredibly messy business. This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247.
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