Such a based game.
Many games released in 10s tried too hard to do this "this game knows you exist" thing which eventually became so overdone that many good examples of that trope now can only annoy you. However I think The Magic Circle is an exception that stood the test of time, mainly because this "meta" thing serves the narrative purpose and translates the main ideas of the game really well. Bad and arrogant creators drive their games into development hell on the one side and crazy fans and gamers act entitled believing they are owed something on the other. Still relevant today, just as it was in 2015 and years before that. And the gameplay is great, almost forgot how fun the main mechanic.

i never actually finished this one, i got to the final section and gave up because i either couldnt figure it out or couldnt be bothered, i dont remember. HOWEVER this is an incredibly important game for me because my main entry into video game fandom (i dont consider myself a gamer but i am a fan of Some video games) was through the bioshock franchise, and (if you know you know) this game is basically nothing but "hey, we're sorry about bioshock. take what you loved about and learned from bioshock and make something better" and that message, in conjunction with having played soma around the same time (a game that poses the rich question of "what if bioshock was good") really gave me hope that video games could like, be good. and stopped me from kind of giving up on them as a medium altogether (i was really really fucking jaded by bioshock infinite). thank you the magic circle. you were Just Okay as a game but you were so real for dissing ken levine like that