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The magic circle metacritic1/11/2024 In fourth-wall breaking fashion, you play as yourself beta-testing it (occasionally your Steam profile appears on screen, and during one unnerving journey into the game’s code, it lists your exact PC specs). ![]() The Magic Circle's landscape is a beautiful mess of abandoned ideas. Now, just days before its “E4” world premiere, it is neither sci-fi or fantasy it has become a black-and-white fiasco, waiting to be exposed. Then, some ten years later (probably as The Lord of the Rings fever reached its peak) it was decided that the project needed to be wholesale rebuilt with a new fantasy setting. Famed for his Spectrum-era text adventures, Gilder commenced work on The Magic Circle in the mid-nineties, seemingly inspired by the System Shock brand of sci-fi that was popular at the time. The Magic Circle is a fictional game project plunged in limbo, developed and farcically mismanaged over two decades by the (also fictional) games industry icon Ishmael Gilder. The Magic Circle's world is a black-and-white fiasco waiting to be exposed.Īll of this, however, is intentional. It's as if a snow of bad ideas had fallen overnight. Key characters, meanwhile, have yet to be animated. Various interiors are stripped down to placeholder textures, while elsewhere internal dev annotations remain exposed. Spread between these two landmarks is a vulgar wasteland of unfinished artwork and abandoned structures, often rendered in hurried black scribbles. Here, the genres of high-fantasy and sci-fi collide inexplicably to the south of the game’s map lies a mountain-sized hand that reaches up to the heavens, while to the east stands a vast star-gate holding open a cosmic tear into another galaxy. The monochrome world it depicts is a shambles of spectacular proportions, so thoroughly misjudged that there's an almost perverse allure to it. ![]() Like with any scene of disaster, it's hard to avert your eyes from The Magic Circle. The review below critiques a work in progress, and represents a snapshot of the game at the time of the review's publication. While the games in question are not considered finished by their creators, you may still devote money, time, and bandwidth for the privilege of playing them before they are complete. GameSpot's early access reviews evaluate unfinished games that are nonetheless available for purchase by the public.
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