Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

MachineGames

Screenshots c/o Mobygames

Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and nobody knows that better than the entertainment industry. We’ve reached a point where the old classic franchises of the 1980s are all seeing revivals, reboots, or just plain re-releases. You can make a lot of good arguments about creative sterility, Hollywood having run out of ideas, or just a risk-averse economy, but I think the truth is, we’re all scared and running back to our old favorites, soft and warm like mother’s bosom. And what’s more comforting, what’s more classically retro, than punching Nazis? And in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the new title from MachineGames and the first non-Star Wars game Lucasfilm has done in years, you get to punch a lot of Nazis, Italian Blackshirts, even a couple Imperial Japanese. All you need is some Falangists and you’d have a whole fascist combo platter!

I somewhat superficially enjoy Indiana Jones. There’s actually a quite extensive expanded universe, but like its big brother Star Wars it really all boils down to the movies. The original trilogy are classics; the two newer ones aren’t quite so well-received, but I personally couldn’t tell you if they were any good. But it’s more the aesthetics that I like; I’m an appreciator of pulp from the late 1930s and the wartime era. That was when we got heroes like Superman, Batman, Captain America, and just a few years before, the Shadow, the Phantom, Dick Tracy and countless others. Indiana Jones descends from a long line of pulp adventure heroes like Doc Savage, Zorro, and Flash Gordon, but the archetype he represents doesn’t seem to have any direct lineage — just a storied history of adventurer archaeologists from the 1930s pulps and post-war men’s magazines. Nevertheless, he himself has become the archetype, from which Lara Croft, Nathan Drake, and of course bisexual heartthrobs Rick and Evelyn O’Connell owe much to. And I’ll admit it — I like the adventurer archaeologist trope, which is probably Tomb Raider’s fault; it’s no more serious than the utterly ahistorical Biblical archaeology nonsense my mom was into, but at least the stuff I like doesn’t claim any of the more fantastical stuff was real!

So of course I was already going to be interested in The Great Circle, no less because MachineGames made it. But playing it is a joy; I’d expected another game like MachineGames’ earlier Wolfenstein titles, but what I got was really something special: a true and faithful Indiana Jones experience with immersive sim elements.

Let’s dig in.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was purpose-built as an Indiana Jones Simulator. In it, you’ll do everything Indy does in the movies: solve ancient puzzles, dodge ancient traps, and punch the world’s bullies right in the jaw. You’ll be armed with a whip, your trusty revolver, and your trustier hat — which actually comes into play in an unlockable survival skill that gives you a chance to resurrect from a fail state if you can only put your hat back on, giving you an opportunity to get away and regroup. You’ll also have access to disguises to help you get around relatively unmolested, plus any number of melee and ranged weapons to clear out the bad guys with. You can knock ’em out with just about any random object laying around — wine bottles, sledgehammers, brooms, military camp skillets, even flyswatters. Don’t feel like doing it the hard way? Use your revolver, or even better grab one of the guns laying around and use that — or flip it around and club ’em in the face with it. I only wish shooting them was more effective — it takes two or three revolver rounds to the face to put down most Nazis, which is one of the many things that point the game towards being primarily stealth focused.

About that: it’s clear that the immersive sims of the past were a big influence on MachineGames, namely Thief and Deus Ex. When you’re not exploring ancient ruins or talking to people, you’ll have to spend time ducking fascists; more often than not, pissing off a whole camp of the bastards will just get you killed, so it’s easier to plan a route in and out, make strategic takedowns, and do what you need to do and be gone before you’re noticed. Throughout the game you’ll find various books laying around on a number of topics in a number of languages; these will confer a variety of skills that you can unlock using experience points that you earn through your deeds, from small such as returning a lost item to someone, to big, such as discovering a long-lost artifact. These skills, sorted into a variety of categories related to fighting the bad guys, navigating the world, or managing your inventory, all serve to make your adventure a little easier or give you new abilities, like being able to use your whip to disarm someone.

The Great Circle is as pure Indiana Jones as it gets, with Indy tracking down a mysterious collection of stones connected to an ancient, prehistoric society, complete with Biblical themes mixed with Egyptian and southeast Asian myth. There’s mythical and literal giants, scenery-chewing Nazis, Indy one-liners, red lines on maps to transition from one setting to the next, excellent cinematography in cutscenes, and references and callbacks galore. You’ll get to wander around Vatican City looking for secret entrances into long-lost tombs beneath the streets, fight Nazis among the sand dunes of Giza, and travel the flooded rivers and swamps of the Thailand jungle. There’s even a major female character, and she’s no shrieking Willie Scott, but a sharp-eyed journalist more than happy to accompany Jones on his adventures.

As an immersive sim, it might not be as robust as Deus Ex, but it doesn’t have to be; stealth is treated cinematically, with the game gladly showing you just how much attention a goon is paying to you when he sees you. Get out of sight, and the little circle that indicates his awareness of your presence begins to shrink. The skills system works great for the game, and the user interface is wonderfully diegetic, with Indy opening up his journal and flipping through it to find what he’s looking for — but this means that while you’re busy staring at your map, you run the risk of someone spotting you!

In a way it feels like a cross section of the original trilogy. Aside from a full-on recreation of the classic opening sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the trip to Vatican City calls back to the Italian theme of the early part of The Last Crusade; obviously, punching Nazis in the Egyptian desert is right out of Raiders, too. And while Thailand (here called Siam, as it wouldn’t take its current name for another few years) isn’t India, the southeast Asian jungle and its ancient Khmer ruins nevertheless evokes The Temple of Doom. We also get to wander around Marshall College, explore the real-life Ziggurat of Ur in Iraq, climb a mountain in the Himalayas in search of a Nazi battleship (think The Philadelphia Experiment, or perhaps what would have been Half-Life 3;) we even, for a brief few minutes, get to revisit Shanghai — albeit, while it’s in the process of being bombed flat by the Japanese. There’s references to everything from Goldeneye to the Silent Hill PT Demo of all things.

Of course, all this really requires a stellar cast to tie it all together. Obviously, Harrison Ford is too old for the role at this point, but that’s okay, because we have Troy Baker, one of the greatest voice actors of his generation. He nails Indy — his voice, his diction, the way he emphasizes certain words over others — it’s all so perfectly emulating Ford’s performances you’d think it was the man himself. And he’s not alone; Alessandra Mastronardi (you might know her from The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) voices Gina Lombardi, scrappy underground reporter; Tom Beck (a popular German actor) voices Gantz, an insecure Nazi who serves, however briefly, as the secondary antagonist, and while his role is more minor, he has his moments. We even get Tony Todd of all people, in what would be his last video game role as the Latin-speaking giant Locus (and given the secret ending, it’s a little up in the air what MachineGames plans to do for the DLC now that he’s gone.) But special mention really has to go to Marios Gavrilis as Voss, Nazi archaeologist and Indy’s nemesis in the story. Voss is slick, manipulative, and just a little unhinged; he is without question the best Indy villain I’ve ever seen. Gavrilis cites Klaus Kinski as an influence on his performance and it shows, Voss being prone to being amazingly out of pocket in almost every scene. It’s amazing.

Is Indiana Jones and the Great Circle an immersive sim? It’s certainly an interesting edge case at the very least. There’s lots of weird details that strip any sense of arcadey feeling from it, like having to manually reload your revolver; the more open chapters (particularly Egypt) make for some fun wandering around and planning your next move. But in addition to the immersive sim vibe, it also felt at times like an adventure game in how it handles the story. In that sense, it feels like a successor of sorts to Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

I had a real good time with The Great Circle. There’s a lot here for an Indiana Jones fan, especially if you’ve been waiting a long time for a game as good as everyone said Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine was; if there’s something I’d ding it for, it’s that it quite frankly ran like shit on my machine, even on lower settings. Sometimes the auto save system would grind the game to a crawl until it was done. Really shows my machine’s age — and I’ve only had it three and a half years!

If you like Indiana Jones, you should get The Great Circle. If you like immersive sims, you should get The Great Circle. If you like games that let you solve puzzles in ancient ruins, you should get The Great Circle. If you like punching fascists in their stupid faces, you should get The Great Circle. Certainly, we can get nostalgic for that, too.

 

-june❤