Can a videogame poke fun at game creators, teach you something about how games are made, and make you a more empathetic human being, all in the span of a few hours? Yes, yes, maybe, and it's called The Magic Circle.

Billing itself as "a dark comedy from game development hell," Magic Circle draws on its creators' experiences working at the forefront of massive triple-A games, many of which (BioShock Infinite and South Park: The Stick of Truth, e.g.) went through some form of IRL development hell themselves.

They've seen egos clashing, designers and coders fighting, months of hard work going straight into the trash can. The Magic Circle has some fun parodying game development's most common pitfalls. But its developers want you to laugh with them, not at them, and hopefully walk away with a bit more understanding of why games are so hard to perfect.

It begins as a pretty obvious goof; you're inside the world of an unfinished videogame, with developer comments, placeholder graphics and unfinished areas. You can see that the game is in a sorry state, and hear the developers (who are watching your playthrough) fighting over everything. Soon, you find that a character in the game is asking you for help—they know The Magic Circle will never, ever be finished, and they want you to take control of things from the inside.

Question Games

You can edit things you find in the world. A Cyber-Rat enemy might just run around on the ground, but what if you gave him the ability to fly and spit fire? This is how you solve the game's puzzles, and it's pretty explicit about the fact that there are many possible solutions and no "wrong" ones.

Opening up the game's world and finding more and more bits of the sharply-written story is thus accomplished by finding more things, draining them of their abilities, then mixing and matching those abilities to create just the right sort of artificial intelligence that will do what you need it to.

Eventually, you'll gain enough abilities to create an army of chimeras that will allow you to find and then kill one of the avatars of the game developers—I think this is intended to recall that time someone killed Lord British in Ultima Online—and then...

...well, I really don't want to spoil anything. I'll say this: You think the game is over, but then there's another surprising twist on the game's mechanics that takes the development-hell storyline to another hilarious place. And then you think it's over but there's another whole segment of gameplay that totally twists your expectations around.

It's not just that these guys have something to say and want to put it into a videogame; they have some really engaging, playful, open-ended game design concepts here for you to mess with, too.

Fun, but unsettling. No one is innocent in The Magic Circle; it takes a dim, fairly hopeless view of pretty much everyone involved in the process, including players. It's not hard to walk away from its final scenes with the sense that everyone, from the top on down, deserves the skewering. (The real-life development studio's name is "Question Games;" I think we're supposed to read that as a complete sentence.)

If there's a ray of hope, it's that in these final segments Magic Circle reveals itself to be something like the videogame version of Understanding Comics, the comic book that taught us how comics worked. I do not mean that Magic Circle becomes an interactive textbook—more like, it acts as a lens, a tool that gets you thinking about the inner workings of everything; the game design process, the game itself.

Like Understanding Comics, The Magic Circle should now pretty much be on the required reading list for anyone who purports to be interested in games, how they're made, and how we interact with them.

With any luck, the next time you play a game, perhaps you're more engaged, with The Magic Circle in the back of your head, seeing the inside. And maybe you're a little more sympathetic to the people who built the thing you're playing, too.