The Life of a Magical Circle Review
Contributed by DJMMT
I was offered a review key for The Life of a Magical Circle by the two-person indie development team, Solideo. Honestly, I wasn’t particularly interested in this game. That is until I saw the official sub-title description. When you go to the Steam page and look at the key visual, you will of course see the game’s title, The Life of a Magical Circle. But underneath that title in the same key visual are the words “a narrated roguelite about following your dreams.” I am not exaggerating when I say that I probably wouldn’t have agreed to add this game to my already busy schedule for review if I hadn’t seen that sub-title.
When I read that description, I immediately thought of the game Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017). I both love and hate that game. I have never managed to finish it, but every so often I go back and try it again. The thing I love most about Getting Over It is the narration. It’s so ironically funny. So, when I read that description for The Life of a Magical Circle (Magical Circle), I went into the game expecting something similar. Before we get into the review, know that sadly this experience is not ironically funny, nor brutally soul crushing. With that said, let’s get to the actual review.
Magical Circle is very elementary in structure, intention, and content. You are a tiny green circle with a dot in the middle. You traverse a map in a Galaga (1981) style vertical path forward whilst trying to collect other green circles, which don’t have dots in them. I believe the dot is there to help players differentiate themselves from the collectibles. If you manage to survive long enough to collect a large enough number of green circles, the game ends. Then it automatically restarts so you can do it again. That’s really all there is to it.
Magical Circle is a simple but ultimately pleasant visual experience. Most of the visual assets are just simple 2D shapes appearing in different colors. The only notable exception might be black holes, which are rare and still technically 2D but not necessarily simple. The most impressive visual aspect of the game is probably the backgrounds. The game has you traverse an ever-changing landscape that gives off vibes of being in an amalgamation of outer space and a subatomic world. It reminded me a lot of the setting Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was going for. It’s a simple looking game, but I think it works very well. Color does the heavy lifting, so shapes don’t have to. There are different colors of circles, which do different things. Otherwise, pretty much everything except the backgrounds appear in their own respective colors.
The game runs very smoothly. I didn’t experience any lag or performance problems that could be related to graphics in any way. However, the simple design elements of the game would be pretty hard to mess up in 2023. It’s a game that runs well because you would have to go out of your way to make something this minimal run badly.
I was also pretty happy with the audio experience in Magical Circle. Again, it’s pretty simple, but I very much enjoyed the ambient music. It’s soft, but clearly inspired by the trance music genre. There are a number of soft tones used to inform the player of different occurrences, such as grabbing a special collectible or moving to the next level/phase of the current run. All the tones blend very well with the general background music. Honestly, I think they just took notes from the background song and autotuned them to sound slightly, but noticeably, different. You can customize the volume level in-game with a slider that goes from 1 – 100. While you can choose to turn the narrator off, you can’t customize the narrator’s volume separate from the music and effects. It’s one size fits all for audio, but that works fine for a game of this small scope.
Writing is an interesting concept to judge in this game. Rather than create a story for the game, the narrator attempts to present you with a story that makes enough sense for the player not to question it, but in no way comes out in the gameplay. The narrator implies that the circle(s) are living creatures just trying to survive. The longer they survive, the stronger their offspring become. That’s pretty much the entire “plot” of the game. Most of the writing is actually the narrator telling you about his own life as a critique and/or guidance based on your behavior in the game.
The narrator, who seems to be some sort of scientist observing/studying the circles, relates all the occurrences in the gameplay back to himself. When you focus on only collecting green circles, he comments on your diligence and commitment to pursuing the final goal. When you get other circles, he comments on your lack of focus and how you’re easily distracted. However, this is usually done in the form of a philosophical lecture that’s phrased in a way that he’s telling you to learn from his mistakes. What I found funny about the narration was that it seemed to equate getting circles other than the green ones to taking drugs. He tells you that he too has a history of pursuing altered states of consciousness and that ultimately he came to regret those decisions. To me, this entire concept was a bit annoying, because there’s no tutorial or explanation of how the gameplay works outside of the narration. So while you’re trying to figure out how to play and think you’re doing the right thing, the narrator calls you a druggie and tells you that you’ll come to regret those decisions. In the context of the gameplay, I found this narrative approach irritating. But I will acknowledge that it was only by listening to the narrator that I managed to beat the game as quickly as I did.
One thing I really appreciated about the narration was that it gave off the appearance of being dynamic. When I first started playing, I was just grabbing everything I could. There is no tutorial, so you have to figure everything out with trial and error. Funny enough, the narrator doesn’t actually start talking for the first time until you’ve already gotten pretty far into a run. I died a number of times before he said anything. Then once he started actually talking about my gameplay I figured out that I needed to change my strategy. Soon after doing this, the narrator commented on my change in strategy. While this game doesn’t have a lot going on, the concept and execution of a dynamic narrator that reacts to your gameplay was very cool. That said, in general I found this narrator mostly annoying. Again, because the content of his dialog is basically a self-critical diatribe about how one should approach life that one would never connect to this gameplay had the narrator not done it for you. I appreciated the effort, but I am not a fan of the execution.
The gameplay is simple, but it works fine for what Magical Circle is going for. You play exclusively with a mouse. All you do is move your circle with the cursor to avoid obstacles and collect other circles. That’s it. I appreciated that you could change the mouse sensitivity from 1 - 100 at any time during play with either the scroll wheel or directional keys. It was hard for me to find a sensitivity I liked, but I ultimately settled on 15. The major issue with the gameplay for me is that movement feels slidey. What I mean is that when you move the cursor, you always slide a bit. It’s not perfect point-to-point movement. I tested this with both a standard gaming mouse and a trackball mouse to see if it would make a difference. Ultimately, it is just the game making it harder to play by adding the slide. As you progress farther into a run, this lack of precision really affects your performance. Dodging obstacles becomes much more difficult as the number of them grows. It’s an annoying mechanic, but it did not stop me from being able to eventually beat the game.
There are four types of collectibles in this game. Green circles are the basic collectible. You need only collect these to beat the game. In fact, that’s ultimately how I ended up beating the game. The narrator told me that collecting other types of collectibles was actually making the game more challenging. The very first run where I decided to only get green circles was the first run that I won. Pink and purple circles, based on my testing, alter the difficulty of the game, but I couldn’t figure out how the system actually works. Collecting these colors causes things to change. For example, enemies appear more frequently. Enemies are red triangles that move dynamically and can even target you. You can escape them by getting far enough away from them for long enough to make them lose interest. Collecting pink and purple circles also causes the game’s state to change.
I was very impressed by the number of different states the game can change to. There is a large variety of ways the game can become more challenging to navigate. Some examples include the playable area of the screen shrinking in size, obstacles becoming invisible, your green circle becoming invisible, the screen splitting in half and mirroring your movement, your green circle growing in size by a considerable amount, and I’m not sure how many others. While this concept is cool, all states outside of normal make the game harder. The most effective way to beat the game is actually to never collect pink or purple circles and just play in the normal state for the entire run. In fact, one of the game’s achievements literally says you have to “complete the game while making it reasonably harder for yourself.” Presumably, this is done by collecting pink and purple circles.
The last type of collectibles are white circles. White circles come in multiple forms. The most common I encountered were green types and red types. Green types, which I’m calling that because of the green electrical current pulsing from them, automatically attract all green circles in the vicinity to you. Think of it like magnetism. Red types, which have red electricity pulsing from them, destroy any obstacles in the vicinity. Specifically, these circles kill red squares and triangles, as I previously described. While that pretty much sums up the gameplay, most of it is kind of pointless. Because the best way to play is not to get anything except green circles. Unless you are trying to get all four achievements, which I couldn’t be asked to care about enough to do, reaching the end is easiest and most efficiently achieved by diligently ignoring everything except green circles.
The best thing about the gameplay is how lives work, and it’s really the only reason the game is even being described as a roguelite. You start with one life. If you hit a single obstacle, you die. When you die, the game judges how close you were to reaching the end by awarding you a number of circles. There are a total of 12 possible circles. Meaning that if you reached halfway to the end of the game you’ll get six circles; and if you finished the game you’ll get 12. When you start the next round, which happens automatically when you die/win, each of the circles you earned acts as a life for that run. The better you do in a run, the easier the next run will be. Personally, I would love to see this mechanic applied to more roguelites.
While Magical Circle is fine for what it is, there’s not really much to it. The game is short. You can complete a full run in like 10 – 15 minutes, if even that. I was able to get my first successful run in under 90 total minutes of play. If you wanted to go for 100%, that’s still not that difficult and shouldn’t take you more than three hours. With the information in this review, you could probably do it in one, if you can manage to get a no-death run quickly enough. The game could have been a lot more satisfying if there was more to it. Like multiple levels, additional enemies, or more achievements. It was fun and challenging enough for what it is, but once I finally completed a run successfully I had no interest in playing more. Meaning that this game could have taken me a little as 15 minutes to get bored with while also having beaten it. It’s for this reason that I can’t really support the $6 price tag. This feels like a 99-cent sale game. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with those games. In fact, one of my favorite games of all time (Tokyo Jungle 2012) was a game I got for 99 cents in a PSN sale.
Ultimately, this game feels more like a tech demo than a full game. It shows off Solideo’s skills efficiently and effectively. I would play other survival puzzle games of this nature from them. However, this doesn’t feel like a full game so much as the start of a full game. Just about everything it offers is technically good, but unimpressive as a whole package. So while I will say that The Life of a Magical Circle might be worth picking up if you see it on sale, I will not recommend that you pay full price for it. I don’t even like the idea of scoring a game like this, but if I must, I guess I’d rate it a 6/10.
1 Comments
Samarjeet ,24 Aug, 2023
Awesome!!!