![]() Despite this game being an empty shell, the player dives in like any other game, succumbing to its rules with no reproach. This incongruity is not accidental, but intentional, meant to resonate with the idea that the game was never finished. But this world is, with all its oddities and nonsensicality, alive, thanks to the narrative that binds all elements together. It’d be a stretch to say that it is believable. Everything lacks polished textures or colour, and there is no sense of direction to this world. In The Magic Circle, the enemies you find are stylistically disparate, as if designed for different games. So the player finds themselves in the middle of all these creative struggles, and has to deal with a world that riddled with absurdity. For example, the tension between gameplay and narrative is presented early on, with a developer’s insistence on adding fighting to the game, despite the story not being able to have players whacking away at everything they find, as it’s about a hero, not a murderer. These developers are people, though, and it is remarkable that their omniscient conversations are surprisingly genuine, covering many of the struggles developers may find when crafting a game. ![]() Developers, who are deemed as gods inside the game, fight a constant battle among themselves to decide on the nature of the universe. We feel for them because even though we’re aware of the fantasy, they exist in the short time we immerse ourselves in that world.Īs you arrive at the world of The Magic Circle, you will realise that it is still under development. The Magic Circle makes the audience empathise with the characters of a piece, as it virtualises their presence and experiences. ‘The Magic Circle’ is a concept developed by cultural historian Johan Huizinga, and defined that self-contained existence that bounds and gives life to the universe comprised in a game or in an art piece, like a book, or a film. In fact, this very idea is the inspiration for its title. Right off the bat it creates an entire universe governed by developer-gods and inhabitant-NPCs, that manages to make out of this collapsed project a live and organic world. The Magic Circle is set in an unfinished videogame, which you, as a QA tester, are meant to complete. As a matter of fact, it could not be any other way, as this is a game about games, and the creative and production process behind the scenes. The Magic Circle, however, has a very clear parallel between the events in-game and the developers’ lives. ![]() There are a bunch of recognised auteurs, naturally, but their print is more of a tonal one, without stories that directly relate to their lives. Reviews // 28th Jun 2016 - 7 years ago // By Borja Vilar Martos The Magic Circle Reviewįor the most part, there is a vacuum between developers’ experiences and videogames that fails to tie in any personal stories between them.
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