5 Things I Love And 4 Things I Loathe About Indiana Jones And The Great Circle

I’m having such a good time with Indy and his splendid circle. My hopes for the game were incredibly raised when I saw the first in-game footage at Gamescom this year, but even that didn’t properly convey that this was going to be a full-fledged immersive sim adventure. It’s tremendous fun, and a big part of that is the many title details that really shine. Oh, and then there’s the shit bits too.

Overall, I’m deeply impressed with The Great Circle, so this article isn’t some bizarre attempt to weigh bad against good. Given how much it’s occupying my time, how it’s making me happy in a way a video game hasn’t since Prey, in my experience the good enormously outweighs the bad. I have so many things to celebrate about it! However, as a committed curmudgeon, that doesn’t stop me from being infuriated every time I read the words “Opens from other side” or not being able to swim underwater for more than five seconds.

Zack already did a brilliant job reviewing the game, so again, this isn’t that. This is me picking out some teeny details and all-encompassing aspects that make me feel joy, then moaning like a bastard about equally small or ethereal annoyances. Let’s start with the loving (and the hating).

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I know this seems like the most ridiculous way to start, something so incredibly minor in the scheme of the game, but I cannot get over how much I love this about Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Every time I see a suitcase with a four-digit code lock, or a safe with five, I’m totally thrilled, not for the puzzle solving that’s to come (although that makes me happy), but for the sheer visceral pleasure of rolling the dials with Indy’s sausage fingers.

Those sorts of code locks are fun to fiddle with in real life, too, of course. There’s a reason those fidget cubes have an approximation of them on one of the surfaces. But there’s something just so astonishingly perfect about how they’re rendered here, how perfectly they roll and click, and the incredibly tactile nature of scrolling them around with Indy’s thumb.

It’s a perfect piece of gaming interaction, and it deserves to be celebrated. I expect a special new category to be announced at The Game Awards.

Locked doors have been a tedious issue in video games for as long as games have had doors. We all learned the unspoken video game language of nonfunctional doors that look painted into the scenery versus those with which we can interact, and as infuriating as it is that there’s never any narrative rationale for this bizarre design, we roll with it. But The Great Circle takes it a stage further, with clearly interactive doors that are locked on the other side, everywhere.

It’s obviously just gating the levels, all such doors marking routes you’ll use on your return, rather than having to trace back along the ledges and windows and drops and climbs and so on you are intended to traverse on your way there. But when where you want to be is there, on the other side of this flimsy door with glass panels, and you’re holding a sledgehammer that’s capable of knocking through walls, it’s pretty annoying stuff. The phrase “Opens from Other Side” appears so, so often in the game’s enormous first third, and I began to greet it with an exasperated growl.

It’s also weird that it capitalizes “Other Side,” rather suggesting these doors are opened from the afterlife.

Big-budget video games don’t often encourage experimentation. Every aspect of every moment is so expensive that it’s often unfeasible to offer anything that isn’t heavily telegraphed. The Great Circle eschews all that with alacrity, happily letting players miss entire sections and sequences without desperately fussing about it. So much so that a friend shared a clip of a funny cutscene from the Vatican that I’d never encountered in all my time there. Because, this is a game where there are huge rewards for just seeing if something might work.

My first experience of this was noticing a pedestal in a dingy stone corridor, the first of them I’d seen in the game, and remembering that quite a while back I’d seen a stone bust on the floor in a distant room. “I wonder,” I thought, assuming I’d be about to waste my time. But I ran all the way back, then lugged the heavy object back down the stairs and through the tunnels, and saw the “X” appear on the pedestal. “Surely not?” I said, and then delighted as it let out a resounding click, followed by the grinding sound of a nearby door opening. I’d found a secret area!

The game keeps on doing this. Find a note in some room far off the path of any of the main missions, and it’ll unlock a little storyline or offer a mystery to solve, or even cause conversation later in the area to change. Notice a pattern in a bunch of the ancient art on the walls, and then realize the number of unmentioned statues in this one room matches the number of images, and what if you just... I love that it respects the player enough to leave these things hanging loosely.

And that’s just the start of the issue. I don’t mean that I have an issue with either action in games, obviously—that would be weird. But rather I really hate how The Great Circle requires such things be done.

One of my favorite gaming moments was playing the Amnesia developers’ earlier game, Penumbra, for the first time, and interacting with the moveable objects. Doors and drawers moved in a whole new way: you’d reach out to them, and then push or pull with the mouse in the most tactile way, and it felt so much more involving as a result. It feels like Indy has tried for something similar, but entirely misunderstood how to get it right.

Here, you reach out to a locked door, and rather than just pressing the button to unlock and open it as would be normal, instead you interact with it, but then have to move the left analogue stick in an often arbitrary direction to complete the move. That’s always to the right when unlocking a door, even when the lock is on right side of the door, and it’s so unintuitive! If the game were aiming for the full-on interactivity of Penumbra (and more games should!), it’d be one thing, but this half-way point just makes for irritating interactions, when just pressing X and being done with it would be a much more rewarding experience.

What Indiana Jones And The Great Circle gets right better than anything I could have expected is that thrilling sensation of exploration. Combining its musical score, its lighting, and the way Indy moves, makes for this absolutely sensational experience whenever I enter a new cavern or catacomb or mysterious tunnel for the first time.

Indy stoops through doorways, and you can hold your torch aloft to light the way, as beasties scurry away and you semi-automatically reach the torch out to light a nearby lamp. There’s an incredible sense of being the first person to enter this location in a thousand years, of having everything laid out in front of you as yours, your discovery, and most of the time, without that being spoilt by impossibly located enemies.

This might be a me-thing, but one of my pet peeves in movies and games is when the adventurers find the lost, hidden temple, and then somehow the baddies are already inside! Tomb Raider has always been the worst for this, as Lara completes near-impossible obstacle courses through the jungle to find the Mayan ruin, and then guns down the seven people hanging out outside. No!

But not here. Here, unless there’s a narrative justification (like enemies crashing a tractor through the rocky ceiling due to their wild incompetence), Indy (and sometimes a chum) have the place to themselves. The threat comes in the form of ancient traps, tricksy obstacles, and those ghastly scorpions and the like. It’s so much better for it.

I am not a very fit man. I’m trying to improve that, making some progress, but even at my most wheezingly incapable, I could hold my breath underwater for more than three seconds.

I don’t know if Indy is secretly smoking 120 a day, or if he was born with a serious lung disorder, but my goodness me, he needs to see a doctor, sharpish. Sure, I’m used to games having super-buff protagonists who can only sprint for five seconds before collapsing into breathless piles (and there I can identify), but I’ve never known anyone run out of air and start drowning as quickly as Dr Jones.

It’s literally three seconds of underwater swimming before he’s panicking, making desperate gasping noises, and the blackness of death starts creeping in around his vision. If someone did a nasty fart near him, he’d die.

While The Great Circle isn’t aiming to be some sort of real-world simulator with “spreading fire” or whatever thing no game has ever actually properly delivered, it does adhere to a few basic laws of physics. And, given how few games do, these moments can really take you by surprise.

A few of us at Kotaku have experienced that moment when you’re sneaking up on a Nazi, holding a glass bottle, and then spot something better to use for bonking them on the head. “Ooh, a hammer!” you think, and then press to grab that, forgetting that dropping a thing made of glass tends to have consequences. Then comes the smash on the ground, and the guard, hearing it, spins around and spots you—a doofus holding a hammer—right away.

I took this to another level when the thought was “Ooh, some dynamite,” and I was holding not a bottle but a fiery torch. As you might have guessed, when I dropped the open flame onto the sticks of explosives, the fuses immediately started fizzing, and I realized the situation I’d created for myself in one big rush. It was “Oh, this game is realistic like that!” combined with “Shit! I need to get away!” And this led to my incompetently fumbling the controls, tripping over a fallen pillar that was immediately behind me, and eventually gathering my wits enough to scramble into an opposite corner as the whole lot spectacularly blew up.

Sure, this is a tale about what a twit I am, but at the same time, it’s a wonderful demonstration of the emergent moments that this lovely game can offer.

Yes, I am absolutely scraping the barrel for complaints at this point, but it’s still something that really grates with me. While this is certainly exacerbated by my desire to be able to screenshot the game for articles, I do think it remains a thing that could be improved upon, in any number of games.

For some reason, so many of the cutscenes in The Great Circle are lit so that the characters are in shadow in the foreground, then the mid-ground with no features is floodlit, and the slightly more interesting backgrounds muted and out of focus. It’s so weird! It keeps doing it!

Screenshot: Bethesda / Kotaku

Over and over.

Screenshot: Bethesda / Kotaku

Even outdoors.

Screenshot: Bethesda / Kotaku

Stop that.

Again, tiny detail, but it’s such a lovely one! The Great Circle makes the very reasonable assumption when you load it that you’re most likely going to want to continue playing where you last left off. So, it loads that already.

Doing this means the game’s main menu is the last checkpoint you reached, such that when you hit continue, but for a couple of moments, you quickly zoom from third-person to a first-person view from Indy’s eyes, and you’re just off! It’s so much more involving, removing all those “YOU’RE PLAYING A GAME!!!” messages that so like to break any elements of immersion.

Even better, that menu screen is alive! It’s packed with NPCs going through their animations, such that you might see Gina wander into shot, scratch her chin, then pootle off elsewhere, all while a group of workers hammer rocks amid patrolling Nazis. Yes, I’m describing what’s happening on the window behind the one I’m writing in—it’s the perfect example. And next time I play, it’ll be something completely different!

There are a wealth of other things to sing about in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and likely a good few others to gripe on, but we’re all already tired.

The most important thing to know is this just isn’t what anyone was expecting, which I think it’s fair to say was a first-person action game in an Indiana Jones skin. Instead, this truly feels like a vivid part of the Indiana Jones universe, and is a far more involving, intricate and interesting game than I’d ever hoped for. I’m delighted!

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