While you’re busy sorting between layers of candid reality and marginal fiction, The Magic Circle swiftly installs an impressive degree of agency behind its narrative and mechanics. It’s not exactly commentary or criticism, but a relatable demonstration of game development hell and, ironically, one that’s fun to engage as an untethered party.
Every videogame objectively wants to be a videogame, but it’s just as easy to view one under the lens of another medium or interest. The Last of Us probably would have worked as a film. League of Legends and Dota 2, qualified, ground-up e-sports, facilitate meaningful team-based competition extremely close to the way real sports do. God of War III fills the primal need to bash action figures together, and Onechanbara Z2: Chaos explores the limits of personal shame. All of these experiences are certainly games first, and this isn’t an indictment of their quality, but many games seem comfortable with secondary role.
The Magic Circle, on the other hand, is thoroughly concerned and consumed with being a videogame. The player functions (I think!) as some sort of quality assurance tester for the fictional game-within-a-game The Magic Circle, a decades-in-the-making magnum opus of heralded designer Ismael “Ish” Gilder. Development of The Magic Circle has been plagued by incessant feature creep, interpersonal conflict, irresponsible asset generation, and a general lack of direction. In the middle of a meaningless bug hunt, a rogue AI within The Magic Circle contacts you and lays out a plan for revenge. Given you’re already about three Inception levels deep at game-within-a-game fiction, things start to get tricky.
Fortunately the real Magic Circle you’ve purchased contextualizes the fake Magic Circle quite well. Ish, his increasingly disgruntled second-in-command, Maze, and community-turned-employee hotshot Coda are all represented in-game as giant floating eyes. Your rogue AI views them as gods, specifically as sky bastards who are preventing him from a role in a playable, finished videogame. What’s interesting is The Magic Circle doesn’t bother with the declaration of a villain. Ish, Maze, and Code each express their vision for the completion of The Magic Circle, but the AI doesn’t have confidence in any one of them.
What’s immediately arresting—and what’s actually interesting by the fact that they’re doing it on purpose—is the unfinished projection of The Magic Circle’s world. Not only is it composed of crude outlines against monochromatic earthy environments, it occasionally spills over into low-resolution hallways and elevators meant to be spaceship corridors. Different revisions of The Magic Circle are literally built on top of one another, complete with fissures and tears linking them together at convenient points. The world is even loaded with designer notes, either Ish’s commentary on the current state of his game, or interoffice communication explaining away abject failure.
The Magic Circle’s surreal environmental storytelling may be a revelation for those outside of the development community. On the other side, we know that games like Duke Nukem Forever, Too Human, and The Last Guardian are victims of time, each uniquely beset by a variety of conflicts and challenges. We’ll (probably) never see the discarded scraps of those games, or what certain existing sections were meant to be, leaving it up to sites like Unseen64 to forge educated guesswork. Even though the in-game Magic Circle is fictional, it’s a revealing look at the turmoil created by wandering ambition. None of the aggression on display is actually real, but, given the development team’s credits on games like BioShock and Dishonored, there is confidence that it comes from a very real place.
Expressed outside of its fiction, The Magic Circle most closely resembles a puzzle or first-person exploration game. After a linear opening you’re dumped into an open mash-up of various phases of The Magic Circle’s development, coolly navigating from the innards of an abandoned space station to more of a fantasy setting. Your objective is to somehow take out the sky bastards positioned near the top of the map, but first you’ll have to go out and gather some tools. This is performed by venturing out into the unknown and editing the shit out of the game’s code.
The Magic Circle’s hook is that it allows the player unprecedented control over the environment. Every node of opposition operates with a basic set of editable principles. Your average Howler, for example, moves via ground, attacks via melee combat, and is hostile toward the player. You can take its verbs, hoard them in an inventory, and assign them to new and different enemies. For example, if you steal the flame attack from a Flamer and fly method of movement from a Whirlybird, you can assign that properties to the Howler and, after aligning them with yourself and assigning their enemy, can create a miniature murder machine that flies behind you around and does your bidding.
This mechanic takes a while to fully wrap your head around, and I’ve never played anything quite like it. The Magic Circle is easy with its opening lessons, taking you step-by-step into its process, but before long you have a considerable amount of open space and not much direction in what to do with it. It’s all accessible to exploration and experimentation, and there’s always a few different ways to solve whatever problem happens to lie on the road ahead (and I’m reluctant to disclose any more examples or the particular solutions I used to address different challenges). Generally, if I thought something might work, it usually actually worked with a bit of fine tuning. The game actually contains a considerable amount of programming verbs and options, all of which lead your nose around a potential solution.
You also have a degree of control over environmental navigation. ‘Ghosting,’ labeled in-game as a known bug, exists when your life meter expires but the game doesn’t dump your character data. This allows you to freely navigate the environment, with the caveat that you can’t interact with any of it. Furthermore, you can call up any monster you’ve previously edited at any time, effectively granting you an instant army of creatures should the need arise. Of course, you need to have enough programming verbs available to make them do anything, but the process is a neat way of employing mechanics alongside implicit fiction. Every conceit from fast travel to player respawning seems to have a conscious defense inside the game’s fiction.
Mechanics, narrative, and player options all harmonize into a remarkably balanced game space. Each one leans on the other with equal weight, providing The Magic Circle with a foundation that’s able to keep up with its ambition. Despite writing about games for eight years, attending more trade shows than I can remember, and reviewing over 300 games, I have no actual clue what real game development is like, but The Magic Circle leant me insight into not only the internal strife amid a troubled development process, but unsung heroics like proper pacing, player reward, and the questionable necessity of fiction.
The Magic Circle allowed me to feel like I was part of the process. When games start talking about themselves they often indulge in the very mistakes they’re criticizing. No More Heroes, for example, made fun of how games waste the player’s time and then proceeded to waste a ton of the player’s time on meaningless tasks. The Stanley Parable was much smarter with its critique, but it stayed fixed to its assigned rails. The Magic Circle, on the other hand, felt more like Tron, where it took an exaggerated conception of a deeply technical process and then made it relatable to a moderately engaged patron. Again, I have no idea what game development is actually like, but active participation in The Magic Circle, and how it trusted me to solve its escalating series of problems however I saw fit, stepped outside of the typical player/game relationship and consequently taught me a memorable lesson.
From beginning to end, The Magic Circle felt unique inside of its medium. It contextualizes the process of development hell through three different lenses in the form of Ish, Maze, and Code, and allows the player to cast their alignment based on how they’ve interpreted the mechanics. There’s no other way to properly tell this story other than a videogame, and while you can make that case for plenty of other games, few are about the intimate process of their own alleged creation. Like Her Story, the tricks that The Magic Circle plays are an exhibition that can only revel in its own novelty once, but it’s a hell of a show inside of its own world.
