The Great Circle Is the First Great Indiana Jones Action Game

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has, rightfully, garnered significant praise since it blew up a bunch of Game of the Year lists that had already been published before December 9. Despite being “just” a videogame, it feels more like Indiana Jones than either of the last two movies, and that sentence was written and edited by a pair who didn’t dislike Dial of Destiny. Great Circle is the best thing with the Indiana Jones name attached since 1992’s Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which was made by the masters at LucasArts during their SCUMM era—you know, for point-and-click graphic adventures. 

Great Circle is tremendous, the kind of achievement that managed to make me less upset about developer MachineGames putting their ongoing Wolfenstein arc on hold to create it. What it is not, though, is a return to form for Indiana Jones videogames. If anything, its existence highlights the vacuum that the franchise left on the videogame side for most of the last three-plus decades, a vacuum filled by imitators who got things more right than the various studios working on Indiana Jones titles, but who still couldn’t quite capture the kind of magic they were going for—the kind MachineGames seemingly unearthed in a long lost, untouched tomb.

This is not the same thing as saying that no previous Indiana Jones videogames were any good. Far from it! The aforementioned Fate of Atlantis is an all-timer in the adventure genre, and just a damn fine videogame regardless of categorization—its predecessor, a graphic adventure adaptation of The Last Crusade, was also beloved, and vital to LucasArts’ success and development in the genre as well. There was less success on the action side, like with Infernal Machine (Windows and Nintendo 64) or Emperor’s Tomb (Xbox, Playstation 2, Windows, OS X), but those were still solid games. Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures on the SNES comes off like an inferior version of JVC and LucasArts’ Super Star Wars games, but that still leaves it as an entertaining platforming diversion. And Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings? Well, the Wii version lets you unlock a version of Fate of Atlantis, who can forget that? 

With Indiana Jones peaking on the videogame side with graphic adventures, and never quite becoming a leader in the action-adventure or action spaces, there was room for original franchises to come along that were undeniably influenced by Indy. Tomb Raider is easily the most successful of those, as the games have sold over 100 million copies, and, in the reverse move, ended up spawning a few of their own movies. Switching to 3D graphics and a leaping, grappling, hanging-by-the-tips-of-your-fingers adventure where you also end up shooting a bunch of dudes and wild animals for Infernal Machine certainly felt like a reaction to the rise of Tomb Raider. (Not to be confused with Rise of the Tomb Raider, of course.) Uncharted is the other most obvious one—those games, developed by Naughty Dog, aimed to capture not just the sense of adventure and danger of Indiana Jones, but were also desperate to achieve the same kind of cinematic feel and success. There’s humor, there’s a knowledgeable lead—Nathan Drake, whose dogged obsessions usually get him into more trouble than anything else—and he’s always surrounded by women who are just as intelligent and capable as he is, if not more so, and who have a difficult time with.. well, all the trouble that those obsessions cause. Unlike Jones, though, Drake is a bit of a grave robber and a thief, not an archaeologist, and his violence is… incessant.

The Uncharted games are great, let’s get that out of the way. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, especially, was firing on all cylinders, and came the closest to achieving the balance Naughty Dog was looking for with a game inspired both by the specific adventures of Indiana Jones, and the kind of success its creators found in film, adapted for games. However! If you’ve been around for a long time in this space, you’ve heard the phrase “ludonarrative dissonance” brought up in relation to Uncharted on more than one occasion. And not to get into that whole discussion again in 2024, but consider that the Uncharted titles struggle with this blending of what you do as the protagonist in-game, and what the protagonist does (and how other characters react and relate to them) in cutscenes, which are entirely on the developer and their vision of the character and the story. There’s dissonance, basically, between the Nathan Drake you see in cutscenes, struggling to shoot his gun at a Named Antagonist, because Drake is A Good Man who struggles with violence, and the Nathan Drake you have control over, who has to headshot 47 guys in a room in order to progress to the next room, which has more dudes who you’ve got to break the necks of or push off of ledges or shotgun in the face or blow up with grenades. By the time Drake struggles to kill the one Big Bad, morally speaking, he’s murdered a small army of mercenaries. There’s a reason that Uncharted 4 included a trophy titled “Ludonarrative Dissonance” for when you’ve killed your 1,000th rando.

Which is fine, in the sense that Uncharted games are big dumb action games, but it’s also something that keeps them from achieving the cinematic heights of Indiana Jones (or, say, from Bioshock, the original inspiration for the term coined by Clint Hocking, from being taken as seriously as it wishes it would be as high-level art that makes you think). Jones, you see, is often tussling with Nazis on-screen, and there’s no struggle there, no dissonance, in terms of his actions towards them. Simply being a Nazi is enough of a reason for Jones to punch, or shoot, or get one caught in a helicopter’s blades, and all of it is consistent for the character, and consistent for the audience, as well. Transferring that kind of consistency to videogames has not been as successful, however: in Infernal Machine, for example, the Nazis were replaced by 1950s Soviets, and Jones is (briefly) working alongside the Central Intelligence Agency against them, and it just doesn’t feel quite as right to bust into their camp and start firing off every gun you can find. They aren’t Nazis, for one, but that’s also just not who Jones is—it’s not quite ludonarrative dissonance, no, but it’s a departure from the best videogame adaptation of the character, found in Fate of Atlantis, who spends most of his time solving puzzles, tomb-raiding, as it were, and, when the situation calls for it, decking a Nazi in the face. That Jones feels the most like movie Jones because his behaviors reflect him and who we think of him as well—any dissonance that exists there is between movie Jones and action-adventure videogame Jones.

Which is a long way of saying that both Tomb Raider and Uncharted wanted to be like Indiana Jones, to various degrees, and maybe didn’t falter so much as aimed to be much more videogame-like than Indiana Jones was or should be, which left them open for the kind of criticism Hocking discussed in 2007. It made them their own thing, inspired by Indiana Jones—and with plenty of quality—but also not quite the thing that inspired them. While there was never an attempt made at aping Uncharted, Indiana Jones games certainly took a cue from Tomb Raider, in the same kind of somewhat boring, safe licensed game development plenty of other franchises have taken, by simply being like existing, popular videogames, rather than fully adapting the spirit of Indiana Jones itself—which, again, created a different kind of dissonance. 

Great Circle seems to have found this missing balance, which previous action games in the series did not, which Tomb Raider and Uncharted either failed to achieve or were not ever interested in achieving. Great Circle marries its various elements together a lot more comfortably than Uncharted ever did—again, probably because you’re fighting Nazis and not mercenaries, and not trying to shoot 4,000 of them in the head before really looking pained in a cutscene about having to shoot one more—but also because it feels like you’re Indiana Jones, from start to finish, in a way that none of the previous action or action-adventure titles in the series had managed. Indy doesn’t run in, guns blazing, to Nazi camps in Gizeh or fascist outposts in Vatican City. He dons a disguise. He sneaks, he skulks, he picks up a shovel, and thwack, down goes an unsuspecting Nazi. He’s placed into humorous situations that would have fit in perfectly in some unmade movie, the writing and acting on point to deliver the most believable version of Indiana Jones since or before a whole lot of people reading this were mere children, and, a bit poignantly given the series’ past, if he attempts to get trigger-happy or start taking on mobs of Nazis with guns all at once, he goes down, and fast. That’s not who Indiana Jones is. He’s not a dual-wielding Lara Croft, he’s not the rogue Nathan Drake. He’s a professor, he’s an archaeologist, he’s Indiana Jones. He’s got a whip, he’s got his intellect, and he knows how to throw a punch when he needs to, at the faces that need a punch the most. Guns come into play sometimes, sure, he’s a swashbuckling kind of guy and all despite the doctorate, but they’re not the point. The violence is part of the equation, but it is not the equation itself.

In Great Circle, which focuses so much on crafting a believable world for Indiana Jones, with a believable adventure for him to be taking, with believable foes and roadblocks and options for dealing with the fascists of 1937… well, all of that stuff is the point. You’re supposed to feel like Indiana Jones, meaning the vision of Indiana Jones you have in your head, constructed from the versions of him you know from the big screen. You’re supposed to believe, like in the movies, that the guy doing the action stuff is the same guy as the one delivering one-liners and figuring out the puzzles of the ancients and avoiding traps. (Well, mostly avoiding traps.) And MachineGames managed this feat, in a way that none of the games influenced by Indiana Jones, or even the games featuring the man himself, have been able to for decades. And never in an action-adventure form, either.

This is not a return to form, so much as it is Indiana Jones finally discovering the form that works for the series. There’s no dissonance here, no attempts to be just like another existing, popular franchise, only with Indiana Jones and his world used instead of Lara Croft and hers. MachineGames certainly pulled from their history with first-person stealth and immersive games like The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay—MachineGames was founded by former Starbreeze developers—but this isn’t that game, only now with Indiana Jones. This is an Indiana Jones game, through and through, the gameplay style a perfect fit for him in the same way Raiders of the Lost Ark was a perfect fit for a summer blockbuster 43 years ago. 

Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.