Despite some attempts to flesh out their motivations, I couldn’t generate a shred of empathy for any of them.

He isn’t all that charming, but he’s far more likable than any of the insufferably narcissistic human beings I met on my journey. I never learned to like the pedantic human characters, though I grew a little more fond of my gruff A.I. Yet moving past that, I enjoyed The Magic Circle more and more as I progressed, impressed by the surprises that unlocked as I continued through the three-hour story. The core of wrath behind the cynicism sometimes makes it hard to swallow. At one point, The Magic Circle stops everything to spend several minutes yelling at me like an incensed preacher berating a wayward flock. The farcical peek behind the development curtain highlights a number of valid satirical arguments about questionable aspects of the games industry, but the delivery is rarely nuanced and almost completely humorless. Artists, designers, programmers, community members, fans, and management were uniformly presented as entitled, immature egotists squabbling over turf, brands, rights issues, and design philosophy. As I searched the shattered landscape unlocking audio files and design notes, I discovered the disturbing legacy of a game company at war with itself. The opening sections of The Magic Circle are mostly linear, but the environment gradually expands into a small open world ripe for exploration, though I found the rewards for that exploration reduced the charm somewhat. And just when I thought I’d mastered the systems, The Magic Circle threw a terrific curve ball my way, springing an impressive twist that completely changed my goals, outlook, and the entire premise of the moment-to-moment gameplay. If I couldn’t solve a puzzle, I moved on in a different direction and inevitably discovered new tools which would help me overcome challenges I’d bypassed, lending a welcome action/adventure vibe to the proceedings. Thankfully, the vast majority of the tricks and traps are better constructed. I wandered around in frustration for some time before stumbling on the obvious solution. Only once did I find myself flummoxed, stuck during one early-game puzzle segment where I completely misinterpreted what I was being asked to do. There are probably more possibilities, too, and overcoming most puzzles in The Magic Circle made me feel smart, resourceful, and inventive - a sure sign of good design. I came upon an abyss brimming with lava, and quickly came up with a couple of solutions: fireproof, floating enemies forming a partial bridge, or perhaps a hijacked pair of nifty teleporters that, positioned just so, could warp me across the trench. Properly manipulating captured servants is the key element to solving The Magic Circle’s many challenges, and I was happy to discover that some situations could be tackled from multiple angles. I could grab robots, corpses, mushrooms, teleporters, and a wide assortment of other game-world denizens and items, and reprogram them to serve me, or just strip them of their powers and then bind their stolen abilities to my other allies.

The main weapon is a sort of quick-hacking tool which allows you to burrow into the programming architecture of game objects, reshaping their characteristics to your liking. Play Most of the brief time spent in The Magic Circle’s virtual world is invested decoding clever environmental puzzles.

The magic circle securitron