I Love: Experiments that work!

Big-budget video games don’t often encourage experimentation. Every aspect of every moment is so expensive that it’s often unfeasible to offer anything that isn’t heavily telegraphed. The Great Circle eschews all that with alacrity, happily letting players miss entire sections and sequences without desperately fussing about it. So much so that a friend shared a clip of a funny cutscene from the Vatican that I’d never encountered in all my time there. Because, this is a game where there are huge rewards for just seeing if something might work.

My first experience of this was noticing a pedestal in a dingy stone corridor, the first of them I’d seen in the game, and remembering that quite a while back I’d seen a stone bust on the floor in a distant room. “I wonder,” I thought, assuming I’d be about to waste my time. But I ran all the way back, then lugged the heavy object back down the stairs and through the tunnels, and saw the “X” appear on the pedestal. “Surely not?” I said, and then delighted as it let out a resounding click, followed by the grinding sound of a nearby door opening. I’d found a secret area!

The game keeps on doing this. Find a note in some room far off the path of any of the main missions, and it’ll unlock a little storyline or offer a mystery to solve, or even cause conversation later in the area to change. Notice a pattern in a bunch of the ancient art on the walls, and then realize the number of unmentioned statues in this one room matches the number of images, and what if you just… I love that it respects the player enough to leave these things hanging loosely.