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The Magic Circle
Released On: May 13, 2015
79
8.0
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 19 Critic Reviews
79
74% Positive
14 Reviews
14 Reviews
21% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 19 Critic Reviews
79
74% Positive
14 Reviews
14 Reviews
21% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
The Magic Circle is an unfinished game in which you play a game about a game that is unfinished; a satirical opinion on the games industry and community. The voice acting is spot on, the world is minimalistic but rich and the unique game mechanics and strong story are making you wonder if you are playing the game, or if the game is playing you.
The Magic Circle is a playable videogame about a broken videogame made by people who aren't good at making videogames.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 46 User Ratings
8.0
67% Positive
31 Ratings
31 Ratings
22% Mixed
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
11% Negative
5 Ratings
5 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 46 User Ratings
8.0
67% Positive
31 Ratings
31 Ratings
22% Mixed
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
11% Negative
5 Ratings
5 Ratings
Fully complete and yet it's an unfinished mastery of story and gameplay. I found myself picking up a copy as soon as I learned of this games existence.... Having completed the story twice I can say it's wonderfully complete. I found myself looking for combinations of powers just to see what would happen. If you don't already know. The Magic Circle is an adventure style game that takes place inside of a broken incomplete game. Stripped of your abilities and left to your own devices you progress through a drudge fest of a "game" created by the games godlike Developers. over time you capture the entities of the game removing their traits and rewriting them as you see fit. Wanna see a fire breathing horde of gnome sized mushrooms it's yours. Given the few hour's I've had with this game i'm writing my first review because I had to tell others of the adventure.
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I would not consider myself an insider - but I do like fun games. This game was a blast to play, has amazing voice talent, not to mention mechanics that allowed me to build an army of undead to do my bidding. What's not to like?
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The Magic Circle is meta as all hell and it works in fascinating ways. Its gameplay and graphics are far from groundbreaking but it’s an interesting experience nonetheless. [Sept 2015, p. 068]
Simultaneously cynical and sincere, The Magic Circle is a postmodern critique of video games that comes in the form of a neofuturist video game.
A valiant modern parable that might also have been an exceptional puzzler, if only it had made its players a little less godlike. [Sept 2015, p.114]
A very creative and original story as well as gameplay. It has a unique style which give it life. A few added controls and some minor graphic and menu changes, and I Believe I could really get into this game.
A pretty interesting satire on the state of the modern game industry and an interesting free-form puzzle game.
The game takes place inside a broken game that is never going to be fixed and you are an entity that has found it's way into the world of the game. You can edit your enemies by going inside their heads and making them your allies, You can control said Allies, make them attack enemies and such. Sometimes you can get a little lost and it can sometimes take a while to figure out what to do but in my opinion that is part of the game's charm. I wholly recommend this game. There are some nice visual flourishes too. For example, the unfinished world is grey and drab but wherever you walk there is a spot of colour beneath you. Your 'Magic Circle' trap looks amazing as well. There is always some amazing thing to look at, some visually creative place in this forsaken world.
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PC
I really hate useless _/10 scores, but this platform forces one, so wait until the end for a recommendation on how much you should buy it for, as I feel it to be a more accurate representation of whether the game is, you know... worth it. The magic circle is a... eh'... it's hard to describe with the magic circle is in a word or two, but it WAS developed by Question. The Magic Circle is a game about people making a game. It's about, first and foremost, how they could never finish it, and has a fun but small cast of characters that are a blast to listen to. The gameplay consists of trapping creatures and literally rewriting their code so they can work to complete puzzles or fight for you. It's pulled off rather well, though, like a lot of games, it doesn't run overly well on my PC. The graphics are fun, switching between a black-and-white fantasy world and a System Shock 2 esque sci-fi world. These are both a great time to explore, and the denizens within are a lot of fun to fight and take control of. It's overall a very welcome surprise to have a game like this, though I'd rather it was a bit longer, as it fell into the trap of feeling like a tech demo. A damn good tech demo, but a tech demo none the less. So... is it worth the $20 price tag? I'd say no, but it'd be worth even a 25% reduction on the price.
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As others have written, it's a satire on gamedev industry. Arguing game developers, long projects, nothing works, nothing finished etc. You run around an ugly world converting monsters and solving small puzzles. There are some pretty interesting ideas here, e.g. you can change parameters of monsters (like make them your ally, just like that). However, after you've "got it" (like, "ok, this is how bad gamedev is") there isn't much else to see or enjoy but the game drags on. Frankly, i didn't find the narrative funny or even entertaining. It's over-acted daily routine of developers, sitcom-level. For comparison, **** comic strips are much cleverer and funnier, if you want some satire on IT industry in general. Not sure if there is anything like that about game development industry in particular. I'm still giving this game a 6 because of the novelty and the experimental feel of this. Such games are definitely needed.
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The Magic Circle wants to be a game about making games. As one of those artsy meta-games, in the game it is a “game within a game”, wherein you are a playtester for a gaming company whose game, the Magic Circle, has been in development hell for the last 20 years. You are quickly introduced to the four main characters. Ish, the pretentious game developer who seems to be riffing on a number of haughty, pretentious game designers. Coda, a fangirl new to the company who has joined the team and is responsible for creating a demo but who is deeply angry about Ish’s failure to deliver a game for so long, and extremely possessive of the game world. Haze, a pro gamer who joined the team ten years ago to try and help Ish understand gamers. And Pro, an AI trapped inside the world, the PC of the previous version of the game which was trashed ten years ago when they started over from scratch.
This game is really driven by story, but it suffers from the flaw of everyone being kind of a jerk. The “good guys” are Pro and Haze, and they’re trying to destroy the company around them. It just goes downhill from there. This makes it hard to really like any of them; they’re kind of fun to watch for a bit, but after a while, it just becomes horror heaped upon horror. Moreover, the actual character arcs are fairly limited, and unfortunately, it felt a bit inconsistent at times.
The actual gameplay isn’t very good either; in fact, I’d classify it as outright bad. While some of this is intentional meta-badness, it is genuinely not a fun game to play. The gameplay consists of pretty obvious, basic actions. It is definitely not a twitch-based game, and is really centered around solving puzzles with the tools you have.
The core of the gameplay – in fact, the ONLY gameplay in the game – is shooting a little magic circle under an enemy. You have tons of time to do this, so this isn’t really hard. Once they’re trapped in your circle, you can strip off all the abilities from the enemy or even make it into your friend so it will attack other enemies for you.
This sounds neat, but it is literally the only gameplay mechanic there is. There are a few enemies later on in the game which your dudes cannot attack easily, and which require you to kill them by getting a tractor beam ability to pull them down to be attacked, or to get the railgun ability to shoot them from range. Then, you just do the same thing.
These three things – plus the ability to ride around on the back of a fireproof turtle – solve every puzzle in the game.
The result, then, is that the gameplay mostly consists of wandering around the game world searching for collectables; you can complete the entire game in under two hours if you’re just trying to beat it, and frankly, the collectibles don’t really add all that much. The puzzles are mostly just “find ability and use it to solve the puzzle”; none of the solutions are ever particularly clever, and almost all of them basically have one or two “pieces” to them.
The gameplay is just too straightforward, without anything really to mix things up until the end of the game where you create a little mini-dungeon to send the AI through – which is really very basic and not all that fun to create.
As there is no intensity in the actual gameplay itself, and the game world is deliberately drab and ugly (and very monotonous looking after a while), there’s just not much to love here. The story is only okay, it ends up coming off as a bit too caught up in how clever it thinks it is, and the gameplay itself is pretty poor.
All in all, I can’t really recommend this. It had some vaguely interesting ideas, but ultimately, not much was done with them, and the moment-to-moment gameplay of the game is just not very engaging.
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Summary In this darkly comedic story, you are the hero of an unfinished fantasy game - and your designers have failed you. Trap their creations. Swap behaviors and body parts, crafting your own unique solutions to free-form puzzles. Steal the power of creation, to either ship the game from the inside ... or cancel it.
Platforms:
- PC
- PlayStation 4
- Xbox One
Initial Release Date: May 13, 2015
Developer:
- Question
Publisher: Question
Genres:
