![]() If you do win the battle, then congratulations, there’s another one coming imminently. A battle that will be even harder, boasting more powerful enemies, more enemies, and monster spawning points pitched closer to the city. You make do, of course, buying scraps of armour here and plonking down cheap barricades there, while trying your hardest to keep your defences intact during the next battle. Invisible city workers will tear down ruins for raw materials, or patch you up, but there are never enough resources to do, or buy, everything you might want. Combat rewards with gold that can be spent constructing facilities or buying gear for your characters, and materials that can be used to build defences, including bits of wall. But first you have the daytime to prepare. One bad night will beget a worse one, the following day. Can you afford to waste your precious mana points (which only recharge slightly between battles), and can you really risk sending your warrior unaided into the horde? The state of the battlefield persists between combat, so you’re forever weighing caution against these (occasionally necessary) acts of heroism. Skills are derived from your equipped weapons-every weapon type has its own skill set-and they can be a lot of fun to use, as you rain down arrows on the horde, or you use your spear to make a zombie kebab. While the monsters do fight back, enemy turns are compressed together, so you don’t have to sit there while 60 zombies each politely shuffles forward. The Last Spell tailors the tactics formula to suit its movie-epic combat. If you're interested in peeking behind the curtain to see how the video game sausage gets made, then you owe it to yourself to play The Magic Circle.That might mean three or four fancy-looking, and pretty devastating spells, or your warrior wading into the swarm to single-handedly squash a thicket of zombies, using skills purposely designed for such numbers-thinning. But as much as it's a satire of game development (especially those games that find themselves stuck in development hell), it's also about giving you a small taste of what actual game creation feels like, perils and all. I don't want to spoil too much, because the joy of The Magic Circle is in figuring out its solutions and piecing together the mystery behind The Magic Circle's development for yourself. (Bioshock director Ken Levine even voices an HR rep in a few of the audio logs, which probably makes The Magic Circle the most 'meta' game-about-games ever created) And while The Magic Circle is relatively brief, it's layered with loads of humorous meta-references to the development process, botched video game conference presentations, creepily obsessive fandom, game criticism, and much more. It's hard not to imagine bits and pieces of their own experience on that title and others seeping into this one, of realizing that as ridiculous as many of The Magic Circle's scenarios and story beats may seem, they're all probably based in some sort of fact. Question, the studio behind the actual game, is made up of ex-Bioshock Infinite developers - a game that went through its own sort of troubled development on the road to release. And the soundtrack is a collection of fits and starts, with the composer mumbling over temp tracks as he tries to decide which song better fits the mood of the scene. The boss encounter scripting hasn't worked for years. None of the environments or textures have color. Ish is such a perfectionist and so incapable of making decisions that he eventually decides to undo all the work that had been done up to that point and start over from scratch. That's nothing compared to The Magic Circle, the fictional game-within-the-real-game from egomaniacal superstar developer Ish Gilder, who has spent over two decades in development hell crafting the long-awaited sequel to his beloved 80s-era text adventure. 15 years is how long it took for Duke Nukem Forever to go from inception to completion, a game which was in development longer than the combined production of the entire Lord of the Rings film trilogy. The internet has gone from screeching dial-up curiosity to a ubiquitous font of information and communication available in our pockets. A child can go through the entire US public education system with a few years to spare.
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