Just 100 percented Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. A new Indiana Jones story presented in an immersive sim-flavored style meant that it was basically overdetermined that I was going to like this game, but even taking that into account, I was really impressed. The devs made the game’s locations feel like characters in themselves—always the sign of a good immersive sim—and really sensitively-portrayed characters to boot. I was pleasantly surprised to see an Indy story that at least paid some lip service to the problems of colonialism in archeological research and artifact-collecting. The actual human characters struck me as really well drawn, too. Everybody spoke in their own native language rather than just being given stereotypical accents, which is always a plus for me. The game has some particularly kickass female characters, and Indy himself even gets some rare pushback and comeuppance for his usual casual sexism. Inevitably, Indy gets a love interest, but I’d say she’s the best one we’ve seen after Marian Ravenwood, and the story’s written such that we see how this new character relates to Indy’s feelings for Marian. The end of the game even gives us a good reason why we’ve never heard of this new person in Indy’s life before. I don’t know how Troy Baker managed to channel a young Harrison Ford so well in his vocal performance, but I never once got pulled out of my immersion by thinking “wait, Indy sounded weird just then.”
A major hurdle for any Indiana Jones story is finding an artifact to center on that doesn’t feel like a letdown after the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail, and Great Circle definitely succeeds on that score. It’s a global chase that makes every location feel necessary rather than just tacked on for the sake of variety (which it has in spades). I’m actually doing some work right now for a team translating an ancient text that heavily quotes some of the same sources that the game draws on, which made the story’s mythological twists and turns extra fun for me. I didn’t manage to predict the location of the final showdown: they went with Noah’s Ark when I had thought they were building toward the remains of the Tower of Babel, but that choice certainly didn’t come across as a rug pull.
The immersive sim elements are fun, if a little light, but then they also make perfect sense for an Indiana Jones story, which was never going to be System Shock or Dishonored. Great Circle is also on a deep and fundamental level a game about punching fascists, though, and that side of the game is thoroughly satisfying. The fighting is technical enough to be interesting without ever feeling so complicated as to be out of character for the movie series. In combat Indy feels just like you would expect: he’s a scrappy hero who can win any one-on-one fight if the player works for it, but he’s not a tank, and when he’s badly outnumbered it’s usually wisest to run away. There are plenty of guns available, and you’re perfectly free to use them, but I found that under most circumstances the sound of gunfire brought down more heat than I could easily deal with, and which meant that for emergent gameplay reasons I didn’t get into the kind of shooting rampages that are common in games but never appear in Indiana Jones movies.
This is a big enough game that I’m sure I’m not bringing anyone’s attention to it for the first time, but I never thought we’d get another great Indiana Jones game after Fate of Atlantis, and to my surprise Great Circle clears that bar easily. If you have a device that can run it, this one’s really worth your time.
