I haven’t been particularly excited forIndiana Jones and the Great Circle, though some of my colleagues have expressed various levels of enthusiasm forthe game,its developerMachineGames, and, uh,whips. While it’s lookedfineso far, I did sigh when I heardTroy Baker doing his best Harrison Ford impression, and it’s disappointing that we’re gettinganother IP tie-ininstead of a wholly original game.
The game will be released in December, and interestingly,will also hit PS5 in early 2025.
And yet, as early previews of the game have started to trickle in, I’m finding it increasingly appealing. While MachineGames is best known for its FPSWolfensteingames and therefore wasn’t an obvious choice for an Indy game, it looks like the studio is getting a lot of things right. Our archaeologist pal isn’t gonna B. K. Blazkowicz his way through his journey.
Indiana Jones Picks Brains Over Brawn
My largest point of contention with this game was that I wasn’t particularly interested in playing Indiana Jones as an action hero. Early trailers showed the titular archaeologist shooting a minigun from a plane, swinging across environments like Spider-Man with the help of his trusty whip, and punching the lights out of many Nazis, which is standard action-RPG fare. Not particularly interesting, and not very Indy.
While there was some puzzle solving featured in those trailers, it wasn’t a huge focus, which led me to think that pretty much everything in this game would be overshadowed by the combat. To be fair, our own Jade Kingwas pretty impressedwith the combat and how the whip was integrated into these battles, but also highlighted that there were plenty of ruins and temples to explore and survive, a laTomb Raider.
But other previewers also described how the demo made action secondary and instead prioritised emphasising the Indiana of it all. For example, instead of doing the action hero thing and storming a Nazi camp, Indiana puts on a disguise to gain access, and more generally uses his brain instead of his fists.
The Great Circle Has Puzzles On Puzzles
AnInverseinterview with game director Jerk Gustafsson reveals that the studio made a conscious effort to make gunplay secondary to the rest of the game. He said, “We know that we can do [shooting] well, so it’s never something that would ever concern us. We know that we can get that right. So very early on, we did this pie chart with different types of experiences. Everything from stuff like hand-to-hand, navigation, and traversal. We started our focus on those things that we knew were going to be challenging, especially in first-person.”
In aseparate interview, Gustafsson revealed that there would be quite a lot of puzzles, and not just easy ones that players can breeze through – “Those [players] that are looking for puzzles that can be hard to solve, they will find them.” Some of the very difficult ones will be optional, it seems, and while it’s not clear exactlywhatkind of puzzles the larger game will face, previewers described solving a puzzle in the Great Sphinx of Giza by snapping photos to collect clues.
It looks like The Great Circle won’t be just brute force and speedy whipping, it’ll make us use our brains like Indy does – after all, the iconic character spends quite a lot of time solving environmental puzzles and avoiding booby traps in his quests to obtain various relics. That alone is already more than I expected. Lord help me, I’m putting my fedora on.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
WHERE TO PLAY
Uncover one of history’s greatest mysteries in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle™, a first-person, single-player adventure set between the events ofRaiders of the Lost ArkandThe Last Crusade. The year is 1937, sinister forces are scouring the globe for the secret to an ancient power known as the Great Circle, and only one person can stop them - Indiana Jones. You’ll become the legendary archaeologist in this cinematic action-adventure game from MachineGames, the award winning studio behind the recent Wolfenstein series, and executive produced by Hall of Fame game designer Todd Howard.
