Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Nobody asked for a first-person Indiana Jones game. That was the consensus when the first trailer landed: a franchise built entirely on the visual language of a man in a leather jacket running away from things, rendered from a perspective where you can’t see the man, the jacket, or the running. It read like a studio applying its only hammer — MachineGames made Wolfenstein, MachineGames makes first-person games, therefore Indy goes first-person — to a nail that didn’t fit.

The consensus was wrong. The Great Circle is a strong argument that perspective is a design decision, not a genre obligation.

Set in 1937, wedged into the narrow continuity gap between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, the game casts you as Jones chasing a conspiracy around the Great Circle — a ring of ancient sites strung around the globe with suspicious geometric precision. Racing you is a fascist expedition under Emmerich Voss, a villain who is genuinely unsettling rather than merely goose-stepping set dressing. Bethesda Softworks publishes; Todd Howard executive produces, and his fingerprints are visible in the structure — dense, hand-authored hub spaces you’re trusted to poke at rather than a corridor with collectibles bolted on.

Critically, it landed well, holding an 87 on Metacritic. That reception positions it in an odd, welcome niche: a big-budget single-player game with no live service, no season pass, no multiplayer bolt-on, in a market that keeps insisting those things are mandatory. It is also, notably, an adventure game in the classical sense — one where the puzzle difficulty and the combat difficulty are separate sliders, because MachineGames correctly assumed some players are here for tomb riddles and some are here to hit a man with a frying pan.

Both audiences get served. That’s harder than it sounds.

• The whip as a full verb set: Not a cutscene prop. It’s a grapple for chasm traversal, a disarm tool that yanks rifles out of guards’ hands, a trap-trigger at range, and a stun opener. One input, contextual across traversal, combat and puzzle-solving — the closest thing this game has to a thesis statement.
• Improvisational melee over gunplay: Fistfights are grimy, weighty, and fought with whatever’s on the table. Frying pans, shovels, bottles, mop handles. Guns exist and are deliberately terrible options — loud, alarm-triggering, and tonally wrong. The game punishes you for playing it like a shooter, which is a bold move from the studio that built its reputation on shooters.
• The camera as a puzzle instrument: Photographing clues feeds Indy’s journal, which tracks riddles, translations and “adventure book” objectives. It turns documentation into a mechanic instead of a menu.
• Semi-open hub design: Vatican City, Gizeh, Sukhothai, the Himalayas — large, dense, period-authentic spaces stitched between linear cinematic set pieces, each stuffed with optional tombs, mysteries and field notes.
• Split difficulty sliders: Combat and puzzle challenge tune independently. More games should do this. Almost none do.
• Disguise-driven stealth: Uniforms, blend-in behavior, and a detection system that turns most encounters into a social-infiltration problem before it becomes a fistfight.

The Gameplay Loop

The core rhythm is: arrive somewhere gorgeous, get overwhelmed by it, get quietly obsessive about it. A hub opens, the journal fills with half-legible leads, and you start pulling threads. Some lead to critical-path story beats. Many lead to optional tombs that are, frankly, better designed than the mandatory ones — self-contained puzzle boxes with a clean premise, an escalation, and a payoff.

What makes this work is friction placed deliberately. You don’t get a waypoint conga line. You get a journal entry that says something oblique, a photograph you took twenty minutes ago, and a room that suddenly makes sense. The onboarding is patient enough that the first hub teaches you to read environments, and by Gizeh the game trusts you completely. That trust is the best thing about it.

Combat is where the loop gets more argumentative. MachineGames has built an encounter design that actively resists the player’s muscle memory. You walk into a courtyard with six guards and your instinct — twenty years of first-person training — says find cover, find a gun, clear the room. Do that and the design answers loudly, with cascading reinforcements. The intended read is: scout, find a uniform, whip a rifle out of the one guard who matters, and then knock him unconscious with a mandolin. When it clicks, it’s about as Indiana Jones as a game can feel. The improvised melee is built with real heft — hits are designed to land with a crunch and a stagger, blocks and dodges have honest timing windows, and the animation work is built to sell contact better than most dedicated brawlers.

Where It Strains

The stealth is the game’s weakest structural pillar, and it’s weak in a specific, fixable way: enemy detection is inconsistent by design. Sometimes a disguise carries you past an officer at conversational distance. Sometimes a guard clocks you through a doorway at forty meters with no clear line of sight. In a system this punishing — and it is punishing, with alarms that cascade fast — inconsistency isn’t a difficulty setting, it’s a communication failure. You can’t play around rules you can’t infer. That’s a legitimate complaint, and a common one.

Gunplay is the other soft spot, and here the design deserves more patience. It’s bad on purpose. Weapons are unwieldy, ammo is scarce, firing is a commitment. The design intent is clear and defensible. But intent doesn’t fully rescue execution: when the game forces a firefight in its later acts, you’re handed a tool the entire experience has trained you to distrust, and it plays out exactly as unsatisfying as that sounds.

The Mid-Game Sag

The hubs are the game’s best idea and, eventually, its most exhausting one. The middle stretch — roughly the transition out of the Vatican and into the wider world — starts padding density with checklist content. Field notes that don’t say anything. Mysteries that resolve into a small stat bump. There’s a difference between a world that rewards curiosity and a world that taxes it, and stretches here cross the line. It’s the open-world tithe, paid in full.

Interface and Information Design

The journal is a standout. Handwritten, period-appropriate, and legible enough to actually track puzzles with, rather than a decorative quest log. Translations accumulate, sketches annotate themselves, photographs slot in beside relevant riddles. It’s skeuomorphism that earns its keep — the diegetic framing isn’t decoration, it’s how you actually navigate a mystery.

The third-person shifts during climbing and traversal are the one place the game blinks. They solve a real legibility problem — hand-over-hand ledge work in first person is nauseating — but the transitions are abrupt, and the seam shows every time.

id Tech 7 remains one of the most quietly impressive engines in the industry. The art direction leans hard into hand-crafted specificity: the Vatican isn’t a generic cathedral, Gizeh isn’t a sand texture with a pyramid on it. Materials read correctly — wet stone, dusty leather, tarnished brass — and the lighting does enormous narrative work, from cramped torchlit crypts to the flat brutal noon of the Egyptian desert.

Troy Baker’s performance deserves specific credit. Doing a Harrison Ford impression is a trap; do it too well and it’s uncanny, do it too loosely and it’s a stranger. Baker finds the register — the exasperation, the dry timing, the tiredness — and it holds across the campaign. Paired with a brassy, pulpy 1930s score that knows exactly when to shut up, the presentation is the most confidently authentic thing about the game.

The technical cost is the sting. The PC version requires ray-tracing-capable hardware. Not “recommends.” Requires. For a 2024-era release that was a defensible line in the sand; for anyone still on a pre-RTX card it’s a wall, and the frustration is entirely earned. A 2D-scale concern this is not — but id Tech 7 has a long track record of scaling well on hardware that clears the bar.

Steam is the definitive version, with the caveat above. Mouse-and-keyboard gives whip aiming a precision that transforms the disarm mechanic from a soft-lock assist into an actual skill expression — flicking the crosshair onto a specific guard’s rifle mid-scramble is a small joy. Granular graphics options are present. Controller works fine; mouse is better, specifically because the camera-puzzle system rewards fine-grained framing.

Nintendo is the more interesting story. The Switch 2 port brings id Tech 7 to handheld hardware, and the fit is better than the raw numbers suggest. The compromises are real (resolution, shadow and reflection fidelity, some texture streaming pop-in) but the art direction absorbs them better than a photorealistic-leaning game would. What you lose in fidelity you partly recover in fit: this is a game of slow exploration, journal-reading and puzzle-turning, and that suits bursts on a couch or a train. Gyro aiming is a natural match for the whip. If your only options are a marginal PC and a Switch 2, the Switch 2 is the sensible pick.

The great trick here is a category error corrected. Everyone assumed Indiana Jones was a look. MachineGames bet he was a toolkit — a whip, a camera, a journal, a fist, and a refusal to reach for the gun until it’s the only thing left — and building the game around those verbs rather than that silhouette is why the first-person choice works. You spend the campaign doing the things Indy does, and the fact that you rarely see him doing them stops mattering within an hour.

It isn’t flawless. The stealth needs a communication pass it never got, the middle hours carry a weight of busywork that could be trimmed without anyone mourning it, and the ray-tracing requirement locked out an audience that had every right to be annoyed. But the ambition is real, the craft is dense, and the tonal fidelity is strong. This is what a licensed game looks like when the developer actually understands the license — not as a brand to apply, but as a design brief to solve.

We rate it a solid recommendation for the right audience. Turn the puzzle difficulty up. Put the gun away.