You are the protagonist of an unfinished 1st person fantasy game, trapped in 'development hell'. The designers (played by James Urbaniak, Ashly Burch, and Karen Dyer) are god-like, but so indecisive that they've given you no powers whatsoever. With the help of a mysterious disembodied voice (Stephen Russell) you must seize the tools of game development from these "gods" in order to explore and master the world, uncovering more of the darkly comic story as you go. Rather than traditional puzzles with a single solution, the incomplete state of each environment is a question that you answer in your own way. By trapping the designers' creations, stealing their behaviors, and re-mixing them to your own purposes - you will either ship the game from the inside ... or cancel it.
About Early Access:
Quote:
Why Early Access?
“We wish to do a relatively short Early Access period to gauge the success of our rolling localization plan, language by language, with feedback from actual players before we release it to a wider group. Similarly, because our game is systems-driven and features a "chemistry set" design of sorts, there are unique player strategies we'd like to officially recognize in the release version, and need interaction with -and feedback from- a real player community to discover them. (However! Because the story is about an unfinished piece of software, we will be content complete in terms of narrative, and more final than Early Access typically requires - so we're never willfully asking to be "forgiven" for anything clearly broken.)”
Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?
“Six weeks, depending on the results & feedback of each batch of localized subtitles, hardware compatibility results, et cetera.”
How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
“Subtitles for all our supported languages will be brought online over the course of this period.
In addition, we will incorporate tweaks to the game based on player feedback where it is appropriate and fixes for bugs that a large player base might uncover.”
What is the current state of the Early Access version?
“Feature complete, story complete, but subtitles will be English Only at first, as stated above. Because we have only one mode of difficulty, we will respond to any overwhelming feedback on balance that we receive during Early Access.”
Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?
“The game is content-complete, so players who purchase Early Access will be paying 19.99 USD. For their bravery, Early Access players will also receive the Original Sound Track of The Magic Circle. Additionally, the price will be ten percent lower in the first week, as a thank-you to the vanguard.
The price may rise at official release.”
How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?
“Players continue to surprise us with new solutions to the puzzle-like challenges the game puts before them. If any of those novel solutions seem like they should be officially recognized or supported with small tuning changes, we will make them. We will also readily and gratefully accept feedback on the quality of the localization subtitles, as those languages come online. Finally, if - through working with players we discover optimizations to allow for better compatibility with a wider variety of hardware, we'll incorporate those fixes before final release.”
Last edited by prudislav on Thu, 9th Jul 2015 20:18; edited 3 times in total
Yeah it's pretty quirky and it apparently gets stranger still later on.
You are some sort of play-tester in a game the developers will never finish with everything being mostly abandoned and broken and through interaction you try to restore it and also remove said developers who are akin to "gods" in the game world, apparently later on you design your own game and take it to E4 for a review and well I haven't gotten that far myself so I don't know but the game is full of light humor and satire.
There's also a mysterious entity guiding you whom later turns out to be a character left unfinished from the developers/gods previous game set in a 1990's type visual style such as say System Shock 1
Throughout the game you don't have any powers yourself but you can gather "life" from tears in the environment and use this to trap characters such as enemies, these can then be edited such as changing them from hostile to allies and assigning factions while also adjusting traits such as how it walks (if it walks at all) and how it attacks plus special attacks, this also visually changes the object such as a mushroom hopping across the landscape if you enable it to walk or growing teeth if you give it a melee ability, now you can't turn every enemy you find into a usable ally since you have to manage "parts" or traits if you will, take the ground and melee ability from a early dog-like enemy and it'll slump down on the ground without teeth and legs but these can then be set to other more powerful entities, special abilities also come into play later such as electric fields to open doors in the sci-fi retro environment or being shielded from fire to healing. (Death doesn't do much in this game, you respawn in the nearest "tear" and any dead creature can be revived instantly if you have the required amount of energy to do so.)
Various audio logs gives insight into the chaotic nature of the developers which adds some background and while the game is fully open there's some natural obstructions such as a bunch of fire breathing rocks blocking a bridge or a door requiring a ability to unlock so progression will be somewhat linear though there's certain hidden objects you can activate that add new areas to explore often with power ups such as increasing the total amount of "life" you can store or giving a boost to one of your pets such as increasing their HP.
Visuals are pretty crude both as the game is designed to look unfinished and due to the pretty low-poly and low-res texture work plus the Unity engine (4.5.6 I think it was.) with somewhat more basic visuals plus it's a indie studio with limited resources and all that.
(Rough animations, basic voice acting and so on, still I find the game to be pretty funny but I'm not sure I could recommend buying it, definitively give it a download first if you are interested and see what it is before deciding.)
This game is brilliant . It's a damn fun experience, kinda Stanley Parable-sque with trippy visuals, hilarious dialogues and lots of self-references/jokes (voice acting is especially great). It's actually interesting gameplay-wise as well, the formula is quite simplistic, but thorough exploration is required to progress.
I'm not sure there's even an endgame, so far I've got a zoo with me. George the Aristorat, huehuehue (walking mushroom), Jimmy the zombie, Pansybot, a rock called The Rock, Dickbutt the rolling ball and so on. Even a sentinel, a mage, some teleport machine and a walking key because why the hell not.
Without spoiling too much, we have just updated The Magic Circle with a bunch of new content for the final section of the game! There are now nearly twice as many options available there, which is something that a number of players have requested since we launched. In particular a hidden aesthetic from the main game is now properly represented.
In addition to the new content, there are also a number of usability tweaks and small bug fixes bundled in with this update as well. As always you can find the full update notes in the forums.
Thanks to all the people who have given the game a shot, it has been a blast seeing how much you enjoy it!
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