The greatest licensed video games let you step into an iconic character’s shoes in a way a movie never could. For many fans, their love of superheroes like Batman and Spider-Man was reinforced by tens of hours spent cleaning up Gotham City and New York in the Arkham games and Marvel’s Spider-Man, with the slower pace of a video game letting the players fully inhabit the heroic mindset.
Well, with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle we can add another entry to the list of all-time great licensed games – and it arrives with perfect timing. After 1989’s The Last Crusade the Indiana Jones franchise began steadily coasting downward, with Lucasfilm desperately trying to write an action-adventure around an aging Harrison Ford. That process culminated in the humiliating flop of 2023’s The Dial of Destiny, which seemed destined to be an embarrassing coda to a once-great series.
Well, like Indy somehow escaping a fatal situation by the skin of his teeth, The Great Circle redeems the franchise.Set one year after the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark (whose iconic opening temple sequence is painstakingly recreated as the game’s introduction) the story opens with the mysterious theft of a mummified cat by a giant figure. Adventure and mystery beckon!
After the relatively straightforward opening, the game sets out its stall in the frankly jaw-dropping Vatican City map. This isn’t quite an open world, but more of a large interconnected environment to explore reminiscent of immersive sims like Dishonored. Poking around in its corners proves deeply satisfying: a surface level of baroque religious marble, under which there’s a labyrinth of dusty secret passages and crypts sealed away for centuries. The undisputed highlight is the game’s microscopically detailed recreation of the Sistine Chapel. There’s more care and attention poured into this single room than there are in entire other games.
The downside is that this sun-dappled beauty is overrun with fascists, with a giant picture of Mussolini being raised in the central courtyard. The experience that follows is a (generally) relaxed game of cat and mouse as you outsmart enemies and sneak around where you shouldn’t be, punctuated with moments of thrills, wonder, comedy, and tension: the precise formula that made the movies immortal.
Without getting into spoilers, the game is broadly episodic, throwing you into several highly-detailed large maps and letting you puzzle, sneak, and punch your way to the answers of why this mummified cat was stolen. Perhaps smartly, the game puts its best foot forward with the Vatican City map, but while subsequent areas aren’t quite as intricate and beautiful, they’re certainly no slouch.
And boy, is this game pretty. I’m playing on ultra settings with full ray-tracing on PC and practically every room has me hammering the screenshot button. Each area has a finely tuned atmosphere created through subtleties: columns of light shining through suspended dust, moonlight over marble floors, or a willingness to envelop the player in pitch darkness with only a candle for illumination. Much of this is cribbed from Spielberg’s movies (specifically Douglas Slocombe’s cinematography), and it goes a very long way to making the game feel like a missing chapter in the movie series.
There’s also a perceptive understanding of how Indy fights. Most combat in the game is hand-to-hand, augmented by your whip that can snatch weapons out of enemies’ hands or yank them toward you (ideally straight into a waiting fist). The game also leans hard into the slapstick undertones of Indy action, forever supplying you with umbrellas, saucepans, and violins to bonk over fascist skulls. You do have a revolver but, frankly, using it feels like a failure of both imagination and comedic potential.
Then there’s Dr. Henry Walton “Indiana” Jones Jr. himself. Harrison Ford’s 1981 face has been immaculately recreated, though the performance has been passed off to veteran voice actor Troy Baker (Death Stranding, The Last of Us, Uncharted). Frankly, it’s unnerving how accurate Baker’s imitation of Ford is and, unless I knew otherwise, I would simply assume this was Ford aided by Lucasfilm’s digital voice de-aging tech. It’s a masterclass performance that should (and will) pick up some awards and I can only imagine the relief the developers felt after hearing the first recording sessions.
But The Great Circle isn’t simply a slavish fetishization of the movies. Developer MachineGames has a cast-iron Nazi killing pedigree from their recent Wolfenstein games, which have a far more nuanced position on fascism than their macho exterior indicates. The Great Circle picks up that baton and runs with it, proving unexpectedly (but depressingly) timely as its Nazi villain cackles “nothing is quite so easy to manipulate as an insecure male!” Mmm. Quite.
Indiana Jones is ultimately a Disney property, so the razor-sharp antifascist satire of Wolfenstein is substantially toned down, but it’s still there and as incisive as ever, and eventually dovetails neatly into the overarching archeological mystery.
There are only a few minor wrinkles. MachineGames have painted themselves into a corner with the invincible dog enemies, doubtless the result of a stern Disney edict that Indy does not kill animals. This results in the bizarre compromise of Indy ‘scaring’ dogs until they lie down for a bit, after which they leap up and begin savaging you again. A little more subjective is that stealth is very fuzzy. Though it wouldn’t make a lick of sense I found myself craving “Indy Vision” so I could see where enemies are through walls though, fortunately, being spotted isn’t a big penalty. And, if you want super-granular nitpicking, I’m not a fan of the pained grunt Indy makes whenever he climbs up onto a ledge.
MachineGames was already in the upper echelon of developers, but with The Great Circle they’re now unquestionably one of the all-time greats. This is a near-perfect translation of the Indiana Jones franchise to an interactive medium, uses that cultural heft to say something extremely relevant to our times, and – perhaps most importantly of all – is just a damn fun video game to play.
On the big screen, Indiana Jones has outrun his last giant boulder. In the interactive world, I suspect his adventures are just beginning.