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Pity the QA testers who worked on The Magic Circle, a game in which you assume the role of an intern tester, trying to break a broken game that's still many moons from release. If the experience didn't trigger something of an existential crisis for them, it surely provided a lasting headache. As you roam its scratchy environments you find that assets and animations are missing, quests are unfinished, and many of the enemies you encounter are rendered in placeholder art. It can't have been easy for the game's real testers to differentiate glitch-by-design from glitch-by-error. They would, however, have drawn some comfort from their portrayal in the game. In The Magic Circle, the playtester is depicted as the noble and courageous foot soldier in the bloody battle that is contemporary game development: hard-working, intrepid, indispensable. The generals, however - those project leads, art directors and producers - don't come off so lightly. The snarky development notes left around the game environment in which, for example, a game designer points out to an artist that players never look up (so any effort spent rendering exquisite ceilings is time wasted) ring uncomfortably true. And Ishmael Gilder, the game's grandstanding director, is closer to an employment tribunal than a release date for his troubled folly. He treats his staff with appalling contempt. You need only look at their Twitter accounts to see how bad thing have become.
The Magic Circle is a trip to development hell, then. You enter an unfinished game whose development team have run out of both money and, seemingly, resolve. It's a game about game development, but not in the style of Game Dev Story, for example, which is a more straightforward examination of the business. This is, by contrast, a kind of live autopsy on a game project that's gone bad. Ten years in the making, and built upon the shifting sands of PC technology, it's become a tonal mess: what started out as a science fiction game, set in an abandoned space station, has morphed into a fantasy adventure, complete with wizards, zombies, rats and robots. Likewise, what starts out as a straightforward QA job, in which you must hunt game bugs, soon becomes more of an archaeological endeavour, as you try to understand the game's gestation, and diagnose where things went wrong.
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