Needs more Mecha-Shiva

As much as I enjoy getting yelled at by Dr. Venture - and, honestly, it's way more than I expected to - The Magic Circle really failed to bring me around. It feels more than a little too "meta" when a game lampooning incomplete game design has, itself, highly linearized and stilted storytelling content. The fiction behind TMC's fictional production process has some cool mystery to it at first, but once some of its beans start to get spilled, the mystique really wears off.

The Magic Circle's gameplay mechanics are not nuanced enough to make a game out of; really, this feels like a humorous story told semi-interactively. And within the bounds of the burgeoning "walking simulator" genre, what makes or breaks this kind of storytelling is how interesting the world is. Gone Home, from its opening moment, used ambient drama and detailed world design to make you want to know what it was about. What I played of The Magic Circle reminded me more of Dear Esther, where the environment you walk around in exists purely for its own sake; to fill time inbetween scripted story beats.

That this story is a well-written satire of an absurd creative process is ... ironic? I think? But as in Matt Hazard, there's an important lesson here about how easy it is to make fun of poor development practices, versus how hard it is to execute good development practices.

Maybe I'm missing some critical information; but Steam reviews suggest that the full game is about four hours long, so if the first 10-15% of that isn't demonstrative then I would be somewhat less than impressed anyway.

Progress: About 30 minutes into the demo.