Satire is most successful when cultural practices are so ingrained that the satire inspires one to think about how things are and how they should be. The Magic Circle conspires to challenge video game culture from the inside, taunting players and developers alike.
It is set in an incomplete fantasy role-playing game named ... The Magic Circle. In this provisional space filled with musical sketches, placeholder art, and misplaced obstacles, the game’s fictional developers at TMC Games bicker over the scope and details of their creation.
Hence, the irony of the title, which salutes the possibilities and limitations of artificial worlds. The narrative mines this rift from the perspective of the developers and an arificial intelligence (AI) that, unbeknown to its creators, has achieved self-consciousness.
While the developers, aka “the gods”, fret over what sort of agency to give the player, the rogue AI taunts you with the idea of becoming a digital Prometheus by seizing the developers’ tools and eclipsing their vision.
Scattered throughout the world are notes and audio logs that record the developers’ fluctuating conceptions of their game in addition to detailing the personal repercussions of toiling on a piece of near vapourware that has effectively bankrupted the studio.
The entries are humorous, plaintive, tetchy, deluded, paranoid, and human – the outgrowths of a business culture reputed for long hours, harsh contracts, and heartbreaking artistic compromises.
Case in point: Much to the lead designer’s anger, multiplayer along with the combat systems she and others laboured over have been cut from the game. But such is the project lead’s decision to avoid having to cater for a player whose behaviour he pithily sums up as “Dr Jekyll and Mr Genocide”.
If this sounds a bit odd or even alien to your experience, I should say that if you have never experienced a glitch in a game before, like falling through the background scenery, then some of the game’s satire will be lost on you. After all, you, the player, are the glitch among glitches, an unscheduled explorer in a misbegotten game that’s taken ten years to approach its first public reveal, even though it’s nowhere near finished.
Although you are powerless, you wield the ability to draw “life” from what developers call BSP holes – flaws in the map. With this energy, you can restore life to deleted characters and trap half-finished or leftover adversaries in your personal BSP hole. Once trapped, you can enter their program files and alter their loyalties and antipathies, in effect turning them into your minions.
Furthermore, you can steal their attributes and assign them to your band of followers that seem like they belong in different games where zombies and mushroom wizards make sense.
The Magic Circle wants to make you consider why you play games in the first place. It may be the wiliest reflection on the medium to come out of a small studio since The Stanley Parable or Fez.
It’s the rare sort of game that wants to amuse you, not pacify you. – Washington Post