Jordan Thomas previously worked on BioShock, and was the creative director at 2K Marin during the development of BioShock 2, but now he’s directing something completely different called The Magic Circle. It recently appeared on Steam Early Access.
The idea in The Magic Circle is that you’re playing as a protagonist inside an unfinished first-person fantasy videogame. Yes, it’s all very meta. The developers of this game are so indecisive that they’ve taken two decades to get the game to its current state, and it’s far from finished.
You’re guided by a disembodied voice that gives you access to the development tools in order to shape this virtual world while the developers squabble. There are bugs and glitches to squash, powers to steal from creatures, and environments to remix. While you do this you also unveil a darkly comic story.
“Rather than traditional puzzles with a single solution, the incomplete state of each environment is a question that you answer in your own way,” says The Magic Circle’s team. Essentially, you get the chance to build a game in order to ship it from the inside out or cancel it altogether.
