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SO META http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...puzzle-exploration-game-set-inside-vapourware
The Magic Circle is a puzzle exploration game set inside vapourware
BioShock 2 director Jordan Thomas turns the immersive sim inside out.
It's fashionable for game developers to show their working these days, so it's no huge surprise when Irrational alumnus Jordan Thomas reveals that his first game since going indie, The Magic Circle, is about the clash of interesting systems in an unfinished setting. But this is no alpha version and you're not invited to contribute to the game's development. Instead The Magic Circle is set in a fictional unfinished game world, and you play an unfinished hero rebelling against the developers' lack of progress.
That might sound like a departure for a man best known for his contributions to the BioShock series - having masterminded Fort Frolic in the original game, Thomas was creative director on BioShock 2 and returned to Irrational to help make Infinite - but another way to look at it is that he has spent a lot of time working on interactive dystopian allegories, which actually seems like quite a good way to describe a game set inside development hell.
"Speaking only for myself, from outside the industry game developers seemed larger than life to me," Thomas explains. "All that old hyperbole about 'Game Gods' - I bought it hook, line and sinker. They had taken on the seemingly impossible task of manufacturing a plausible alternate reality and convincing me to live there for a while. The truth, of course, is far more flawed, far more human - and I would argue more interesting.
"Candidly, it also just struck me as funny to engage in one of these quixotically ambitious, eternally revised projects from the game's eye view. And the idea that you are not in good hands, that the game's designers do not have your back this time (and in fact can't even decide on your powers, so you have no direct way to influence the world at all), so you're going to have to un-FUBAR the world yourself, held a kind of promethean scrappiness that really appeals to me."
But forget all that. The Magic Circle will undoubtedly have a lot of the developer's experience and worldview balled up inside it (and that of his partner at Question Games, Stephen Alexander, another Irrational man, and AI specialist Kain Shin, who worked on Thief 3 and Dishonored), but those layers are likely to be subtle and more fun to pick over afterwards. Your immediate business as the player is with a first-person puzzle exploration game that has a unique art style and a fantastically cool central game mechanic.
The Magic Circle is set inside a high-fantasy remake of a fictional 80s text adventure, also called The Magic Circle, that has been in production for many years. The original was made by Ish Gilder, "a mild-mannered game designer who won't let us call him a genius" in the words of a fake website for the game. An audio diary early on (of course there are audio diaries) reveals that The Magic Circle has been in production for two decades. It's vapourware. The environment resembles a whiteboard outline that has been erased and redrawn - a beautiful, sinewy vision of sketch lines and uncertain clouds, with only occasional flashes of colour showing live elements.
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