A new game was shown off today on the stage at EGX 2014, a game about shaping your own solutions to puzzles called The Magic Circle.

Set in a vaporware game, The Magic Circle is about the hero of this incomplete game, supposed to be a typical RPG, growing tired of waiting for his ‘gods’ (the game developers) and setting out to change the game’s environment. Either to finish the game or completely break it, it’s unclear and both might be possible. The hero is also driven by a ‘trickster spirit’ who has also grown tired of the game developers’ messing around. The hero’s in-game weapons have been locked out from him, so what the hero can do instead is interact with the very fabric of the game with the titular ‘Magic Circle’ which creates glitch-like spaces that makes it possible to interact with entities or objects caught in its field. But only those in colour mind you, easily spotted in the game because the vast majority of what is around you is rendered in a whiteboard-esque style.

Once caught in your field you can steal, add and change properties to do with the entity or object, including movement style, attack style, special abilities (such as Flameproof), enemies and allies. Use it to make monsters your pets, or suicide bombers to clear a path for you past obstacles. Even turn objects into your own bodyguards! As you play through the game you accumulate ‘memory’ which is a cache of what was called ‘wasted potential’ in the presentation. Using this, you can restore ghosted out things in the game. This includes entities and parts of the game itself, bringing back ‘abandoned concepts’ for the game that the developer ‘deleted’ before you came along to restore it.

The main point of this game we were told, was that we as the player were allowed to ‘steal the tools of authorship’ and maybe gain a little perspective of how a game developer’s mind works. Maybe.