Reviews are out for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the latest from Wolfenstein creator MachineGames. I haven’t played Great Circle, and I’m not a passionate Indiana Jones fan, so I’ll admit I’ve been hoping for Wolfenstein but in a hat. Instead, we’ve got… well, check out some of these review headlines:
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Would Have Been Better As A Movie
A Grand Adventure That Keeps Faith With The Movies
The Great Circle Shines When It Forgets About Indiana Jones
The Best Adventure Indy Has Embarked On In Over 30 Years
Every Moment You’re Playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Feels Like Torture
One Of This Year’s Great Adventures
You might look at all these and think the game is divisive, but instead I think it’s the best kind of chaos. Inside the reviews, some people loved the amount of cutscenes–IGN’s reviewer wrote “There are basically two movies worth of cutscenes here, but it never felt like too much”--while others, like The Verge, felt the cutscenes stole the game’s best moments. Some writers loved the game’s puzzles; some thought they were too simple. Some felt Great Circle cracked the code of the movie tie-in game, while others didn’t understand why it wasn’t just a movie instead. I’ve seen Great Circle compared to Dishonored, Hitman, Uncharted, and more. I’ve read a ton of reviews and feel like I have no idea how, or even quite what, the game is.
This is great. There’s so much going on that Nathan and I posted on Bluesky at practically the same time about how much we love what’s happening here.
I have now read thousands of words about Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and I have no idea if it’s a game for me, or if I’m going to like it, or if it’s good at what it’s doing, or exactly what it’s doing at all. Everyone’s takes are so exuberantly all over the place that the only thing I can confidently say as a reader is that a video game exists and has a dude with a whip in it. (Is the whip fun? People disagree!)
This doesn’t just make me want to play the game, it makes me want to read more reviews, including the ones that haven’t run yet. Keep it coming.
