The Magic Circle

The Magic Circle is built on a single conceit and committed to it completely. You're the protagonist of a fantasy game that has been stuck in development for so long it never shipped. The designers — voiced by James Urbaniak, Ashly Burch and Karen Dyer — are god-figures with full editing access to the world, but they're so indecisive and so endlessly second-guessing each other that your character has been left with no powers at all. A disembodied voice (Stephen Russell, of Thief and Dishonored) starts whispering in your ear about how to fix that.

The gameplay is what makes the premise work. Once you wrest the tools of game development away from the squabbling designers, you can directly edit the creatures and obstacles around you. Trap a fire-breathing rat, steal its 'breathes fire' behavior, and paste it onto something else; swap an enemy's loyalty so it now fights for you; rearrange body parts and abilities to assemble unique solutions. Most puzzles don't have a single intended answer — the incomplete state of each environment is the question, and your re-mixed creature roster is the answer.

The writing is the other half of the appeal. The designers' arguments about scope, vision, marketing and player feedback run all through the game, gradually exposing a much sharper satire of how games actually get made. The script earns its content warnings — language and adult subject matter both get plenty of room — and the whole thing pays off with a question it asks the player directly: can you ship this game from inside it?