

I think they set out to make a clever and satirical look behind the curtain of making a big triple A game, and they nailed that.įair enough, what are you going to give it Hex? This has been made by a small team with some serious triple A games to their names. I'd almost say it's more of an interactive statement than a game. I think you need to go into this for its concept and story rather than its mechanics. There aren't many puzzles though and Hex, while I thought this was a really clever concept, with great voice acting and writing, I just kept finding myself thinking, "when does the fun begin?", and then in a few hours, it was over. I'm not sure if standing on a fireproof turtle and making it attack a rock was the best way to cross a river of lava but, hey - it worked!

I loved that you can rename them, I grew pretty fond of little Buttmunch by the end of the game.Īnd I thought it was cool how open ended the puzzle solving was. It's pretty satisfying as you go about building up this army of hacked and mutated creatures to do your bidding. I really liked that once you've hacked into them, you can strip their parameters like their form of movement, attack style, special move, who their enemies and allies are that kind of thing.Īnd once you've stripped their powers they get added into your inventory, letting you apply them to any creature you come across. There aren't a lot of mechanics at work though you can draw power from cracks in the wall which lets you restore greyed out "deleted" areas of the game, as well as trap enemies and objects hack into their code.
Games like the magic circle how to#
But it's not long before you're placed in a small open world and left to figure out how to take down the skybastards with some light puzzle solving. So he enlists your help to take down the developers from within, whom he affectionately refers to as the Skybastards.Īt first this seemed like it was just going to be a humorous Stanley Parable style walk 'em up.
Games like the magic circle free#
He knows the game is never going to be finished and just wants to be free from this development hell. He's been trapped in there since the original version of the game was scrapped and re-written. The developers constantly appear as talking eye balls, arguing with each other about features and frantically trying to get some semblance of a game ready to be shown for the imminent E4 demo they have to present.īut it's not long before you stumble across an old AI within the program. He's over-ambitious and over-promised on so many amazing features but in reality his studio can never deliver on his vision. It's being made by a revered game developer that some fans consider to be almost god-like.

You play as a QA tester on The Magic Circle, a game that's been in development hell for twenty years. It's about as meta as they come, for sure. It's a game about making a game, where you're inside the game, making the game, while the developers argue about the game, while the game itself wants you to just end it all somehow and get the game released. Yeah, it's the back and forth between players and developers that shape the digital worlds they create. It describes the porous membrane that separates the virtual world from the real one. The Magic Circle refers to a philosophical concept about games. Calling it a puzzle game is probably the most accurate description, but really that's just a cover for what is actually a biting parody of game development and fandom. Thanks Goose! The magic circle is a little bit tricky to sum up.
