Despite my respect for the developers and my own fondness for the character, when I saw the first trailer for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle last year I was worried! It featured a lot of movement and a lot of combat, and I thought (while simultaneously recalling the pedestrian pace of the single best Indiana Jones adaptation to day, Fate of Atlantis) hrm that's weird, it's going to feel off to be playing an Indiana Jones game if he's suddenly been imbued with the strength and agility of a 1930s Nathan Drake.
How relieving it's been, then, to sit down and finally play the game, and find that he's actually one of the most relatable video game protagonists of all time. Indy is anyone but Nathan Drake. He's 38 years old by the time of Great Circle, getting on by any standards, but I'd wager especially so for the period, without the scientifically-formulated diet and strict exercise regime we expect a reasonably active 38-year-old from today to be engaging in.
Which is me easing into politely saying Indy is slow as shit. He's not that fit, panting after the shortest jog (though you can boost his stamina via upgrades throughout the game), and his body complains loudly when he has to crawl through things. He's really only equipped to take on one person at a time in melee combat, and even then that can be a struggle. Shooting, while present in the game, is a last resort; professional soldiers are much better at it than a university professor.
Everything seems a struggle for our guy, basically, and my favourite of Indy's various physical struggles is the game's platforming. There are no death-defying leaps or parkour-like jumps here; you are playing as a 38-year-old man and he moves like it. Climbing your whip elicits grunts like he can't get himself up off the couch, while clambering up a ledge sounds more Sisyphean than Herculean. This dude is struggling to get around, to the point where I feel bad asking him to do anything but walk in a straight line.
I feel bad partly because I am also a middle-aged man, and this shit is hard! I can't even walk down the stairs on a Friday morning after Thursday night five-a-side, so Indy's body protesting every time he's gotta haul himself over some stones is extremely relatable. There but for the grace of god, and a few decades of time (I even studied archaeology at university!), go I.
Playing as a slow, creaky 38-year-old doesn't sound fun when you put it like that, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I've seen some reviews paint Great Circle as an immersive sim, owing to how slow and methodical some of your actions are, like having to press a button to put a key in a door then push another button to actually open it. I guess in that way it kinda is (even if the true hallmark of an "immersive sim" is a branching game based on your choices, not a fastidious control scheme), but also this is just the Machinegames way, adapted to suit the material.
These guys have always obsessed over the first-person perspective, from when a bunch of them worked at Starbreeze on Riddick through to Wolfenstein and now this, and have dedicated themselves to the pursuit of its immersion with every game. While some things are new here compared to something like the Wolfenstein series--like the aforementioned door opening--the slower pace and less audacious moveset is mostly down to the fact we're playing a middle-aged academic here instead of a super soldier wearing power armour. If we're supposed to be walking in the character's boots, and that character is slow and methodical, then so is this game.
Which I don't think is immersive in terms of the genre label; it's just a recalibration of what we should expect from our playable characters. I like that Indy being slow makes me consider which missions I'm tackling on a larger map at any time, so I don't have to walk all the way across it for nothing. I like that not being able to leap huge chasms or clamber up walls makes me look at each room like I would as a human being, not as some hyperactive jackrabbit with a camera strapped to their neck.
All of which helps ground you in the experience in the most wonderful way. We're not playing a regular video game with Indiana Jones on the cover, where you can bounce off walls and kill six Nazis in a combo move. We're playing an Indiana Jones game AS Indiana Jones, tedium and downtime and goofs all, which makes it a triumph not just as an immersive experience, but as an adaptation as well.
I was only just talking about this the other day with Star Wars Outlaws! About the joys of a great adaptation, of a team recognising what it is people really love about a thing and bringing it into a game. For Outlaws it was vibes, but here it's the man himself, with players able to possess Indy and play through all his limitations as well as his strengths. In Outlaws I was living in the Star Wars universe, but here the player IS the Indiana Jones universe.
It's an emphasis that's at the very heart of the game, with director Jerk Gustafsson telling Inverse:
“To be honest, that was probably a harder sell internally...I remember reading this quote, I think it was from Spielberg who said ‘Indiana Jones is a non-superhero superhero.’ That became one of the core values of the project. Of course he’s still fit and can handle himself. But he’s also a 35-plus-year-old professor. I had this goal of trying to make it grounded in that way.”
They absolutely nailed it, and both me and my tired bones are so glad they did.
