The immersive sim supergroup at Question, the studio behind The Magic Circle, have announced their next game. The Blackout Club is a cooperative multiplayer game starring teens who discover a secret nighttime society of sleepwalking adults meeting in tunnels beneath their small town, then set about spying on them, recording evidence, and trying to find their missing friend. It sounds like some sort of surveillance-focused multiplayer immersive sim, which is wild. Here, watch the announcement trailer: Read the rest of this entry »
The Magic Circle [Steam page] is a game about an unfinished game. A first person puzzle/exploration/action game about a fictional game also called The Magic Circle, to be precise. After years of development hell, The Magic Circle’s fans look upon it with a mixture of breathless anticipation and derision. Those few staff who still work on it either desperately want out or refuse to abandon their impossible dreams. Now you are inside this half-made game, exploring what it is and what it was, how it ran aground, whether it belongs to its creators or its players, and perhaps either redeeming it or destroying it.
It’s out now. The real Magic Circle that is, not the fictional one. Here’s what I think.
Each week Marsh Davies plays unfinished and broken games on Early Access and usually tries to come up with an introductory sentence which says exactly this while using imagery appropriate to the idiom of the given week’s game. But the idiom of this week’s game is being an unfinished and broken game! So, job done. It’s The Magic Circle [Steam page], a game set within a game, in which the player edits the properties of the world around him while exploring the strata of the game’s many abandoned developmental stages, unravelling the story of its creators in the process.
I have tamed Jim Rossignol’s bumhole. I’ve also made Jim Rossignol’s bumhole fireproof, which is just as well, since Jim Rossignol’s bumhole spews gouts of flame when angered. Jim Rossignol’s bumhole has a lightning rod jammed in it, too, which deactivates forcefields. With my latest effort, Jim Rossignol’s bumhole has sprouted a little propeller, allowing Jim Rossignol’s bumhole to fly about. John Walker’s angry red Weeto has many of the same properties, and it should surprise no one that Alec Meer’s huge husky third leg is shaped like a ginormous mushroom.
You can now buy and play Ion Storm and BioShock alumnus Jordan Thomas’s emergent oddity The Magic Circle [The Magic Circle], but do be aware that it’s not finished yet. No, I know that’s the point of the game – that you roam around an unfinished vapourware game, rewriting it from the inside – but I mean it’s really not finished.
The Magic Circle arrived on Steam Early Access today. In all the layers of metafiction, it may be the most The Magic Circle-y version of The Magic Circle you’ll get.
