Your Local Village Magician 最近的评测

the kind of video game you think of when you think of a video game

the only bad part of this game is when it broke my immersion by showing a cop doing a good thing

This game promises us to take us back to the golden age of platformers, and it does, in a way. Remember when platforms like Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie became popular, and how every company tried to capture a piece of that market? Ty the Tasmanian Tiger and Vexx. Remember licensed platformers after popular TV shows?

Do you remember their clunky, floaty controls that glitched out and got stuck in the wall?

What about the camera that you could never get to point where you want, and clipped through the world half the time?

Or how their haphazard "cartoony" art style made it difficult to platform because the flat shading made it hard to perceive depth?

What about when they tried to turn on fancy realistic shadow, but then you couldn't tell where you would land, so they just made your character have both a realistic shadow, and a dot shadow under you?

How about when they just copied another game's levels directly, because they didn't have any ideas of their own? Except it somehow looks worse than the original, despite the near-15-year difference between them. No? Because none of those old games did that, and yet Poi did.

Poi brought me back to the golden age of platformers, by reminded me that these existed, and that they were not good games. And neither is Poi.

I'm aware this game is Early Access. It's still a bad game right now. If it ever becomes a good game through updates, I will re-review it. Please let me know when that happens.

As good a fan-made mod as you are ever going to get. The story felt a bit cut-and-dry, even though everybody was expecting a twist, and the final boss fight was frustrating for reasons that felt out-of-my-control, but overall, an amazing experience. Excellent artwork, music, puzzle design and cinematics, and a responsive dev team make this a fun play for anybody who loved Portal 2.

The puzzle design could be a bit obtuse at times, and while some say that it was overly difficult, I didn't have that much trouble with it -- I only had to look at the official guide once for a solution to a hunt-and-peck portal spot I was missing. Thankfully, there were very few of those in the game.

For anybody having trouble, I'd really recommend you just take a break and relax for a bit doing something else -- the solutions did take a bit of thought, but it wasn't anything a good amount of creativity and relaxation can't solve.

The Magic Circle... what do I say. It's clear the developers are trying to say something with it, but I'm not sure they themselves know what it's supposed to be saying.

I'm quite sure I was supposed to have some revelation about video games like Spec Ops or The Stanley Parable. But while those games played all up and down the scales of meta, questioning and prodding the relationship between the player and the game, as soon as The Magic Circle grasped onto a point about anything, it slipped and fell off, eventually ending so far down the "CAN YOU TELL THIS IS SATIRE YET?" hole: in the second half of the game, you are required sabotage an entirely faked demo for "E4", the massive gaming convention (yes). It feels less like a story about video game development and more like pent-up retribution the team was directing at their former employers. It struck me as immature.

The characters are all just awful people. Its few attempts at trying to cause sympathy are, well, I'm just going to say it, creepy. One of the characters announces that they're sterile. There's mentions of orgies in the woods at sex castle dungeons. It is extremely creepy and forced and trying way too hard for the Video Games Are Art award. Everybody is bitter and angry and hostile and sarcastic. There was no part where anybody smiled, or laughed, or seemed in any way pleased about anything.

But I'm giving the game a thumbs up. Why? The parts and the narrative about the struggles about video game development rung true. The mechanics of undeleting and editing characters, to having lordes of pets, to the puzzle solving, were ultimately fun. Climbing to places I'm not "supposed" to go to find easter eggs feels rewarding. The game developers know that I'm going to explore every nook and cranny, and they make it worthwhile. There are stories and lore littered around which perhaps give a glimmer of insight, however surface, into the choices and problems that face video games.

The game was at its best when it showed people genuinely trying to make a *good* video game, rather than simply get paid, or get out of a wretched contract, or get revenge on the designer (which, spoilers, are the three goals of the main characters at the end).

The developers also knew that making a game about an unfinished prototype is a slippery slope -- it requires a certain kind of "not polish" that needs to seem intentional, rather than lazy. They pulled this off super well. The art style is "placeholder textures", but when you get near objects, they spring into color and life, showing that yes, they can draw things for real. Some feel like they're out of a freeware game -- unaligned pieces of Arial text and boring controls, but when you go "behind the scenes" and rewrite the game's mechanics, it feels like a really well-done hacker movie, with snippets of code zooming past you. This is a trick that's hard to pull off, and these guys did it.

It's also worth mentioning that although first-person, you never hold any gun. It's about puzzles, interaction, and exploration, which is always refreshing to see.

So yes, is it a good game? No. Not by a long-shot. Is it worth your time, and do I recommend you play it? Yes. At least up until you kill the Sky Bastard.