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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
game
•8/3/2026

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

byMachineGames
SteamNintendo Switch
8.7
The Verdict
"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 thirty hours 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 could lose four hours of busywork without anyone noticing, 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 close to perfect. 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." "Buy it. Turn the puzzle difficulty up. Put the gun away."

Gallery

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Key Features

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 Good

First-person perspective is a genuine design win, not a gimmick
Whip mechanics unify traversal, combat and puzzle-solving under one verb
Hand-crafted, period-authentic locations that reward slow exploration
Troy Baker's performance and the pulpy score nail the tone
Split combat/puzzle difficulty sliders respect different play styles
Improvised melee has real weight and comic timing

The Bad

Stealth detection is inconsistent and punishing
Gunplay is deliberately weak but forced on you anyway
Mid-game hubs sag under checklist side content
PC requires ray-tracing-capable hardware — a hard wall for older GPUs
Third-person traversal transitions are visibly seamed
Some field notes and mysteries are filler dressed as content

In-Depth Review

Bottom Line: MachineGames took the most famous silhouette in adventure cinema and hid it behind your own eyes — and somehow made the character more present, not less. This is the rare licensed game that understands its source material as a set of verbs rather than a costume.

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 you'll die, loudly, having summoned 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 the most Indiana Jones a game has ever felt. The improvised melee has real heft — hits land with a crunch and a stagger, blocks and dodges have honest timing windows, and the animation work sells 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. 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. This is the single most common complaint from players, and it's legitimate.

Gunplay is the other soft spot, and here I'm more forgiving. It's bad on purpose. Weapons are unwieldy, ammo is scarce, firing is a commitment. The design intent is clear and I respect it. 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 feels exactly as unsatisfying as you'd expect.

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 there are hours here that cross the line. It's the open-world tithe, paid in full.

Interface and Information Design

The journal is excellent. Handwritten, period-appropriate, and genuinely legible as a puzzle-tracking tool 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're clean and they solve a real legibility problem — hand-over-hand ledge work in first person is nauseating — but the transitions are abrupt enough that you notice the seam every time.

Editorial Disclaimer

The reviews and scores on this site are based on our editorial team's independent analysis and personal opinions. While we strive for objectivity, gaming experiences can be subjective. We are not compensated by developers for these scores.

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