And unlike Double Fine's Hack 'n Slash, you don't necessarily need a programmer's mindset to figure things out If you're into tinkering with a game's moving parts, there's lots of fun to be had here. And there's quite a bit of leeway as to how you can solve these puzzles if you need that key sitting on a distant ledge, for instance, you can hack the monster on the ledge to make hostile towards keys-causing it to knock this item into the valley below-or give the key the power to move, and have it hop over to you by tagging it as your ally. Thanks to the help of the rogue AI, if you see another living thing, friendly or hostile, you can hack it to change its behaviors, or simply steal these actions and properties for use in something else. Unlike your average environmental puzzle game, though, you can interact with the inhabitants of this world on some pretty deep levels. This game-within-a-game traps players within The Magic Circle, a decade-in-the-making pet project created by the very Lord British figure, Ishmael Gilder (played with a convincing mix of exasperation and weariness by The Venture Bros.' James Urbaniak.) While you're at first asked to do some basic QA testing during the most desperate minutes of the development cycle's eleventh hour, a rogue AI soon sends you on a much more important mission: spiting the "gods" who trapped him(?) within the confines of unfinished content.Īfter this initial setup, The Magic Circle drops you into its sandboxy world, with "taking out the sky bastards" as your overlying goal. These are the issues explored by The Magic Circle, an environmental puzzle game by Question Games, a development team that-as you probably guessed-has plenty of experience with AAA game development, with some of its members having worked on titles like BioShock and Dishonored. When you get right down to it, it's a wonder why anyone wants to be a part of this business in the first place. Then we have the consumers and their demands often well-intentioned, but just as often without the knowledge of how things are actually done. Though several developers fail to make the cut with the coming of each new hardware generation, the HD era has been particularly dire, forcing teams to grow exponentially to overcome new challenges-leaving one poor sap in charge of perpetual cat-herding for years on end. The past five years alone are littered with horror stories about studios falling on their swords after a single project gone wrong. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.Įven if you only follow the industry tangentially, it should be crystal clear that making video games can be an incredibly messy business. This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247.
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