The Magic Circle launches on Steam Early Access
BioShock 2 director Jordan Thomas reveals his hand.
Puzzle exploration game The Magic Circle has launched on Steam Early Access priced £14.99 (there's a 10 per cent discount until 20th May).
The Magic Circle is from Question Games, co-founded by BioShock 2 director Jordan Thomas. In it you play the hero of an unfinished first-person fantasy game trapped in development hell. The designers are "god-like", but failed to give the hero any powers. So the player must seize the tools of game development from these "gods" to explore and master the world.
"Rather than traditional puzzles with a single solution, the incomplete state of each environment is a question that you answer in your own way," reads the official blurb. "By trapping the designers' creations, stealing their behaviours, and re-mixing them to your own purposes - you will either ship the game from the inside... or cancel it."
The Early Access version is feature and story complete, the developers wrote on The Magic Circle Steam page, but subtitles are English only for now.
The developers said they expected the game to remain in Early Access for around six weeks before a full version will be released. The full version will incorporate tweaks to the game based on feedback.
"Players continue to surprise us with new solutions to the puzzle-like challenges the game puts before them," Question wrote.
"If any of those novel solutions seem like they should be officially recognised or supported with small tuning changes, we will make them. We will also readily and gratefully accept feedback on the quality of the localization subtitles, as those languages come online. Finally, if - through working with players we discover optimisations to allow for better compatibility with a wider variety of hardware, we'll incorporate those fixes before final release."
Ex-Eurogamer editor Tom Bramwell (who?) previewed The Magic Circle back in June 2014.
