The Magic Circle

The Magic Circle conspires to challenge video game culture from the inside, taunting players and developers alike.

The Magic Circle is the best "broken" game you've ever played - and a rich satire of the industry to boot.

The Magic Circle is a playable videogame about a broken videogame made by people who aren't good at making videogames.

The Stanley Parable was a brilliant satire on video games. The creators of The Magic Circle picked a different target — not games themselves, but people that work on them. And, unlike those “walking simulators”, there is plenty of fun stuff to do.

The message is a little muddled, with so many accusing fingers thrust in so many directions that I'm sure different people will come to radically different conclusions of what it all means. But it's a message worth hearing, and a world worth exploring, if you care about video games and the people that make them.

The Magic Circle is meta as all hell and it works in fascinating ways. Its gameplay and graphics are far from groundbreaking but it’s an interesting experience nonetheless. [Sept 2015, p. 068]

The Magic Circle is one of the most memorable games of the year and a glorious satire of the gaming industry and culture. It also has an extremely creative puzzle mechanic, though the actually puzzles are sadly a bit on the light side. [Sept 2015]

The Magic Circle addresses the monster we’ve built as a gaming community, acknowledging that the medium is still in bumpy, rebellious, grumpy adolescence, and while we may come out of it and accept maturity at some point, all of us have some thinking to do before we get there...It’s harsh. It’s heavy-handed. But it might also be necessary.

Simultaneously cynical and sincere, The Magic Circle is a postmodern critique of video games that comes in the form of a neofuturist video game.

This kind of open-ended ambition may leave players feeling lost at times, but its exploration of the act of creation and collaboration will stick with you for years to come.

A marvelously creative, puzzling adventure that’s very mad at you.

Visually drab and a bit too taken with its own story, but otherwise a clever and fun exercise in creative problem-solving.

The Magic Circle’s appeal runs the gamut of the video game industry. While players might have one experience, someone who has actually worked in game development might get something entirely different from the game. And with a well-written script and some talented voice acting, it has a narrative that you’ll actually enjoy instead of merely coasting through to see the credits roll.

A valiant modern parable that might also have been an exceptional puzzler, if only it had made its players a little less godlike. [Sept 2015, p.114]

There’s a spirit of revolt in your work, a rhetoric of mortals killing the gods competing for control of The Magic Circle.

Although its mechanics are not upbeat enough to have you engaged for hours at a time, the story is interesting enough to say something, however niche this message is.