MachineGames’ Indy story leans too hard on the cinematic. Available on Windows PC and Xbox Series X Dec. 9.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle kicks off a brand-new adventure with nostalgia. The start of the game, serving as a tutorial, is pretty much a one-to-one re-creation of the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You get to incarnate Indy, but only slightly — you’re constantly interrupted with cutscenes featuring dialogue and camera frames matched to the original film. It’s a showcase of how, 40 years later, CG technology can recreate movies to a painstaking degree of fidelity.
This sequence’s presence is passed off as a flashback dream for Indy. The rest of The Great Circle takes place a year after the events of the homaged movie. But even if the tribute is a commendable effort, it sets a precedent for the experience as a whole. The clear obsession to deliver a cinematic story around the character of Indiana Jones constantly clashes with this modern video game rendition of the films. Which is a shame, because there are plenty of interesting ideas when you actually have control.
Developed by MachineGames of Wolfenstein fame and published by Bethesda, The Great Circle is a first-person action-adventure game. After an ominous character breaks into Marshall College to steal a specific treasure in exhibition, archeology teacher and renowned tomb raider Indiana Jones is tasked with retrieving the item. The search leads you to travel across multiple locations, presented as open areas to explore, while gradually uncovering a web of leads around the namesake mystery.
During some cutscenes, of which there are many (almost four hours of them), the scene freezes and you’re given a button prompt to perform certain actions. Not in quick-time event form, but almost in a Telltale-esque fashion. In the introductory Raiders re-creation sequence, playing on PC, Indy lifts his hand to activate the light trap with W. Removing the spiders from Alfred Molina’s back with Indy’s whip? That’s A instead. Even traditional cutscenes manage to be disruptive. Oftentimes, after you’ve completed a puzzle and gained access to a secret room, you have to investigate the area for clues, which usually involves manually picking up evidence. The way it plays out? Move to the object, grab it, watch a short cutscene. Repeat this two or three times until you get a longer cutscene, and then you’re finally allowed to move to the next objective.
The overall intrigue of the story is interesting and prone to hook you in, although you may know what to broadly expect if you’ve watched the original trilogy. Thankfully, there’s plenty to do aside from watching cutscenes, which helps with the pacing. The open areas are packed with collectibles and side stories, some leading to one-shot puzzles while others unlock more involved quest lines, such as an underground fight club (sorry for breaking the first and second rule). Whether you’re looking for clues or just admiring the accurate historical re-creations of each locale, there’s one tool that ties Indiana Jones and the Great Circle together: a camera.
To my surprise, you spend a ton of time taking camera shots of evidence and historical architecture for the main story, but also of people doing random and funny things. Some side missions involving the camera are quite silly, reinforcing this; in one, you have to search for a lost cat who happens to be all the way up on a rooftop inside the Vatican, take a picture of it, and then return to the wanted poster to place the cat picture on top of it.
