The Magic Circle

The Magic Circle is a strange and acquired taste -- and that's what makes it worth a play. You're suddenly dropped into the world, and while you're trying to understand why it's so janky and broken, you gain the ability to harvest and reassign behaviors among the game's inhabitants. This is done by trapping/editing everything "alive" that's meant to have a behavior in the world: how it moves, whom it guards, how it attacks. By doing this, you build up a "word bank," allowing everything to be snatched and assigned at will. The further you progress, the more you can manipulate the world around you with your war chest of words. But you must be careful, as, once you use a word, if you want to use it in the future you have to retrieve it from that creature once they're back out in the world.

Cleverly, your goal here isn't to cause as much fighting as possible but to proceed past all the glitches and dead ends so you can keep moving forward in your exploration of this flawed world. It's very much about experimenting and not at all about conquest and vanquishing foes. The game is very self-aware and very strange, especially because it tries to demonstrate why some games end up the way they are: not cohesive and confusing to navigate, with characters who don't fit. This is a gleeful celebration of wrongness in video games, in a big and intentionally messy package.