![]() The specifics of these won't be spoiled here, but suffice it to say, The Magic Circle is a narrative tour de force. The story is not over when this goal is reached, however, as two additional sequences form its jaw-dropping finale instead. With the overall goal (reach and hijack a god avatar) established not long after, it's reasonable to assume that this aesthetic juxtaposition is exclusively how the tale will play out. About an hour in, the player discovers the game's previous version and begins pulling in elements from it to fill in the gaps in the current iteration. The way the story progresses is also insanely ambitious. Meanwhile, the three main "gods" are all barely exaggerated caricatures of infamous fan types: those that aren't satisfied unless they can show off their skill, those who consider "fun" to be beneath their genius minds, and those crazy devoted ones who just take their hobby way too seriously. The story progresses at the expense of half a dozen of the industry's favourite potentially shady business tools, including pre-ordering, 'Early Access,' and episodic titles, as well as the E3 hype machine. ![]() In addition to being a playable treatise on the conflict between auteur and committee design, it's also an irreverent satire of gaming at large. The themes in this ridiculous exercise in self-awareness are numerous, but because they are all related to game development (a concept that any prospective users undoubtedly have at least a cursory understanding of), they all resonate. This AI enlists the player to piece together something functional from the wreckage, in the hopes that he will be able to live his life as part of a released product. His rampant perfectionism (and the conflicting ideologies of the other designer "gods") has resigned the project to development hell - and literal hell, from the perspective of a defunct AI protagonist trapped in the stalled programme. The plot takes place inside the eponymous videogame, the successor to a fictional text adventure that was so successful and well-regarded that it propelled its creator into cult celebrity on par with a Romero-Newell-Kojima hybrid…and gave him a massive god complex in the process. Champions of games as art tend to love interactive metafiction, so they are likely to find a new darling with The Magic Circle.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |