Obsession, Perfection, and Pleasure
"Listen, over the course of making this game, we're gonna make... thousands and thousands of decisions... all we can hope for is that we get 70% of them right... if you get really obsessed about each little thing, you're gonna drive yourself nuts." -Dave Lang, Giant Bombcast 03/18/2014 31:10
The Magic Circle is a game about obsession turning from an extension of pleasure into its enemy. Characters are obsessed with getting the game, a sequel to an old text adventure they're fond of, perfect. And they are willing to do some horrible things to achieve it. As the player, your advantage is you don't care. You have no memories of or fondness for the original Magic Circle, you just want a decent, playable game.
The narrator feels the same way. He's gotten sick of their obsession crippling his game, and he's willing to break it to save it. And you're his tool for breaking it. A half-hour tutorial sets up the scenario with the basic controls sprinkled throughout before throwing you back into the game as a glitch, able to trap the various monsters in the world and strip/change their variables to make a small army of weird minions. Soon after, you encounter monsters you can't trap, and the puzzle becomes figuring out which variables/powers you need to give your minions to kill them (another way of stripping their variables). Variables are also limited- if you strip a Float movement from one monster, you can only assign it to one monster- and one of the larger puzzles is devoted to figuring out a way around that as well.
The player is given utter leeway on how to solve them, with the narrator hanging a lampshade on it: "Don't worry about finding the perfect solution to these problems. Perfectionism is what caused this mess in the first place!" Although there's 1 or 2 puzzles that require a specific ability to solve, for the most part you're allowed to screw around and come up with half-assed solutions that are messy and barely work... but they work. (My preferred tool of choice was a horde of hive-minded fire-breathing flying shrooms.)
However, this part is shorter than you expect. In fact, the entire game is shorter than you expect for $20, but the puzzle-solving aspect itself is replaced in the endgame by... well, I suppose it's another type of puzzle-solving, but not what you expect in a puzzle/adventure game. It ties into the "ambition vs progress" argument running throughout the entire game and ends on a meta note trying to change your relationship with games. If the entire game was just "code your minion army to solve puzzles", I'd say it was only worth $10. But that endgame was so unexpected and enjoyable, I'd tack on another $5 for it. Maybe even $10. It's expensive, but it's a well-made game with a good story and a unique twist that I don't remember seeing in any other game. If you like puzzle games, and discussing the creation of games (and what can go wrong doing it), this is probably worth your money.
I finished the game in 3 hours, but only found ~70% of the items/secrets. It normally costs $20 on Steam, but is currently (July 15th, 2015) on sale for just $17.
