Some games are art. Some games are life-changing experiences.
And some games let you knock Nazis in the nuts with a pickaxe.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is an absolute romp that perfectly channels the spirit of the original movies. It’s the best Indiana Jones game since Fate of Atlantis—and yes, it really is that good. With surprising set pieces and a story that never overstays its welcome, the Great Circle is a delight. I found myself willing to overlook its weaknesses because I was too busy grinning from ear to ear.
I completed the whole game alongside all the fieldwork, which clocks in around 26 hours. That is, if you don’t get distracted exploring the beautiful locations.
A story for the ages
Given the number of times I’ve watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, I was a little cynical of the tutorial level, which mimics the opening of Raiders shot-for-shot. But the game opens up into a globe-trotting sandbox, where Indiana Jones races against the Nazis to find a series of esoteric artifacts. Of course, the Nazis want to use that power for their own nefarious ends. It’s up to Indy to stop them.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is clearly made by people who love Indy. It shines out of the humour. It’s in the wry look of Indiana Jones as he picks his hat up for a second chance. Or masquerading as a priest taking a dramatic confession in the Vatican. There’s a lot to be said for a game that makes you genuinely laugh-out-loud in a tough year.
The story is a perfect example of how to draw the player in through mystery, drip-feeding clues one at a time. What starts as an investigation into a stolen cat mummy escalates to a world shattering conclusion. The stakes escalate with each revelation, perfectly timed to match key plot points. Each piece of fieldwork contributes to a greater understanding of the story, which is exactly how side-quests should work.
In both the combat and cut scenes, the game captures the pulpy slapstick of the films. The Great Circle often references the madcap opening to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Picture Indy chaotically grabbing for an antidote while Willie scrambles for a diamond. The highlight of this tomfoolery is a showdown between villainous Voss and Indy in Gizeh. This scene both develops the villains and entertains the player. Pretty heavy lifting for a single scene, all without losing its light touch.
This reliance on the films’ iconic set pieces is also one of the game’s weaknesses. The storytelling relies too heavily on existing material. We know Indy hates snakes, and that’s played out in every chapter of the story. Likewise, the sandbag-idol switcheroo is referenced in many of the tombs. I would have liked to see the story add to this lexicon of iconic scenes, rather than draw from already beloved moments. The game is best when it creates original set pieces in the spirit of Indy.
Yet the Great Circle knows exactly what people expect from an Indiana Jones story and delivers on that promise. There’s adventure in exotic locales! A cast of earnestly quirky NPCs! A dastardly villain and his goons! And oh, how it does these so well.
Part of the sheer enjoyment of this game stems from how well-realised (and brilliantly hammy) the villains are. Emmerich Voss is an antagonist to rival Belloq, chewing the scenery for all it’s worth. His intellectual mind games will leave you guessing until the very end. Tough-guy Gantz is your classic blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryan filled with love of the Fatherland. His choo-choo speech is a monologue for the ages. Although I’m pretty sure I heard his lines about being invincible in Goldeneye.
The game has solid female representation, with a cast of strong women. This includes journalist Gina Lombardi, the clever archaeologist Dame Nawal, and Thai rebel Pailin. I’d been concerned that Gina would play too much into female archetypes. But there’s a brilliant line of dialogue when Indy asks for a lipstick to draw a diagram. She retorts she has a pen, because she’s a journalist. It establishes that she’s to be taken seriously in the search for her sister.
But as much as I like Gina’s hotheaded determination, she physically gets in the way of solving puzzles. When looking at clues, she walks in front of whatever Indy’s holding, breaking your concentration on the puzzle at hand. She insists on taking the left lever, regardless of where Indy’s standing. And is over-explanatory in tombs and puzzles, when you’re just having a look around. Maybe it’s the introvert in me, but I prefer travelling solo through these ancient ruins. Dame Nawal wouldn’t be this annoying.
On the more serious side, there’s a strong theme of both national repatriation of objects, and the theft of archaeological artifacts from their country of origin. Indy is firmly on the side of the good guys because he believes in artifacts staying in their country of origin. It belongs in a museum… in the home country!
Indy himself faces development as a character when having to choose between the past, or moving on to his future. It’s a clever, albeit obvious, metaphor that parallels with his journey as an archaeologist.
The game is also a love letter to linguists. As someone with a degree in languages, I loved the emphasis on international language representation. Non-English speaking characters tell stories in their own language, from Latin to Thai. And damn, I forgot why Indy is so sexy – not because he’s charming, but because he’s outrageously smart.
The wits and fists path: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s Gameplay
If you’ve played Uncharted, then you’ve got a taste for the type of action-adventure mix of combat, stealth, and puzzle solving that keeps the Great Circle going. The game perfectly balances these quieter moments of exploration with thrilling adventure. You’re never stuck too long in one mode of gameplay. There’s enough here to keep any type of player entertained. If you want to spend hours tracking down every journal article and solving puzzles galore, you can. If you want to zip through the story and leave the puzzles until later, you can also do that.
It’s a model that has both great replayability in revisiting maps. It’s also a structure that can be repeated in a multitude of exotic locations for the future DLC. Comparisons to Hitman are well-earned, although the locations are more realistic than Hitman’s campy humour. Disguises allow you to infiltrate restricted areas, and you’re encouraged to stealth eliminate enemies using anything on hand. Taking a rake, violin, or toilet brush to a Nazi never gets old.
As for combat, well, sometimes the AI is smart, sometimes it’s dumb. The fascists clearly have a Spanish flu epidemic. The amount of times they sneeze as an audio cue to alert you to their whereabouts borders on the ridiculous. Allergies.
Even on hard, you can sneak up in the side vision of an enemy and thwack them over the head without them noticing. Like in any stealth game, going all out guns blazing usually ends up in your untimely death.
What’s less successful are the myriad of Ubisoft style collection quests. I spent a lot of time grabbing books, journal articles, and weirdly shaped artifacts. These are a step above your standard collection quests, because many of the journal items and photographs provide further background to the plot. Collecting books upgrades your combat and survival skills. Still, collection quests give me the ick in 2024.
It wouldn’t be Indy without the infamous grail journal, and the Great Circle’s journal is beautifully and lovingly designed. TTRPG designers take note. The Great Circle’s maps are a masterclass in creating atmosphere and tone, while providing the player with information.
Puzzling adventure
For the most part, the main quest puzzles aren’t too difficult, but they are a lot of fun. Particularly notable was the puzzle in the Vatican to enter the tomb. It was an elegant riff on the stations of the cross.
There’s a variety in puzzle types from matching games and shifting mirrors. The mirror puzzles reminded me of my favourite puzzles in Assassin’s Creed: Origins. More mind-bending are the code-breaking puzzles, many of which are optional brainteasers scattered throughout the maps as mysteries. And I still haven’t figured out how to use a repair kit. 🤷
The moments where I got most stuck were in the platforming elements, where there wasn’t a clear vision of how to escape the situation. I don’t know how many times I tried to escape a particular tomb, only to drown in quicksand time and time again. I’m not sure if this was user error or design error…
Some moments of jankiness could easily be fixed in future patches. There was a point in Gizeh where I couldn’t hand over an artifact to finish a quest until I’d completed another piece of fieldwork. It was frustrating to have to run back over the map to finish it off.
Despite running a souped up PC, the autosave juddered the game into sluggish pauses while running through the maps. Body physics could use a little work too. Hiding baddies after sending them off to the dreamlands resulted in some amusingly placed bodies. Where’s the laundry basket option?
But when I look back at my time with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, I don’t remember these issues. I think about how many moments surprised and delighted me. How I squealed at the screen when Marcus Brody turned up. How the early promise of set pieces was delivered – and then some. And how good it felt to be back in the joyous, pulpy spirit of Indiana Jones, his triumphant theme playing in the background as I thwacked villains in the name of archaeology.
At its heart, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a game about the power of language to tell mythic stories. But it never over intellectualizes this theme at the cost of fun. I often say that games don’t need to be fun to be meaningful. It’s a mistake to think that a game has an obligation to entertain you, just because games culturally imply ‘play’, and play should be fun.
But some games just let you fight fascism with a dirty toilet brush. And damned if that’s not fun.
Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from Keymailer. https://www.keymailer.co
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