Go! Go! GOTY! 2024: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

• Game: MachineGames's Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• Release Month: December
• Started: 10/12
• Completed: 15/12

In retrospect, I think the moment Indiana Jones and the Great Circle hooked me like I was a convenient whip grappling point sticking out the side of a building was seeing the subtitle "(fascistic whistling)" pop up for one of its many ambient enemy guard noises. MachineGames is definitely a studio for whom bashing fashies will never go out of style, whether it's a milkshake-loving Nazi from an alternative 1960s America or a well-coiffed but high-strung Il Duce fanatic in 1930s Vatican City. That the game released this late into the year probably felt unconducive to its developers due to missing out on any GOTY gongs (it theoretically gets included in next year's contests, but how often do you see a December game from the previous year take home awards?) but I'd argue it was very well-timed given recent election results fomenting a certain need to vent one's frustrations on dipshits who are all too happy to let greedy populist leaders walk all over the vulnerable and different. Blind devotion to the most ridiculous fuckers alive (at the time, in this game's case) is nothing that a quick shove off a ledge or a surprise wrench to the back of the head won't cure. But hey. Preaching to the choir.

Speaking of choirs, let's talk Biblical shit. This game once again adheres to the Indy's franchise's "Christian mythology is real" tenet with some traditional supernatural-tinged ecclesiastical business, this time following a set of McGuffins related to a "Great Circle" with text written in the pre-Tower of Babel universal language (the grid-like hieroglyphs of which suggested that the antediluvian humans really enjoyed checkers) and a race of giant guardians that have been protecting said collection of fancy rocks, one of whom is played with the right balance of menace and grim dutifulness by the late Tony Todd. (He sort of reminds me of that one Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword dude from The Last Crusade: the ol' "wait, maybe this guy trying to kill me has a good point" dynamic when it comes to messing with forces beyond your ken, which Indy seems to do a lot.) Likewise, the villainous rival archeologist Emmerich Voss is a delightful combination of sneering smug villain and ressentiment-impaired perennial runner-up to Indiana's proven archaeological track record of finding incredible artifacts and then losing them again, who ends up being funnier than you'd expect from a prim Nazi scholar. Last, we have the feisty female lead Gina Lombardi who is channeling her possible future descendant Aloy in that her main task appears to be following you into ruins while saying all the puzzle solutions out loud along with plenty of other obvious tidbits alike. It's really a thankless role, though, so I'm not going to come down too hard on poor Gina for landing somewhere between Elsa Schneider and Willie Scott on the usefulness gauge. She did occasionally save my bacon, almost being better in a fight than Indy is. (On that note, Troy Baker could be some kind of sapient Harrison Ford AI for all I know; that's how well he disappears into that role.)

So yeah, let's talk the combat and action in the game. It naturally takes after Uncharted a significant amount—only fair, since Uncharted takes after Tomb Raider, which itself takes after Indiana Jones movies—by presenting areas crawling with guards where your best option is to stealth your way through, since Indy's the type to get as good as he gives in a fistfight. Fine with most Nazis when they're attacking in single file, but a group with guns is going to be a little too much for an Ivy League professor. Thankfully, the times when you do have to resort to fisticuffs demonstrate that the somewhat involved hand-to-hand fighting engine isn't as much of an afterthought as you might imagine, though once you've figured out how to parry and dodge and get in a few punches while the enemy recovers it's unlikely you'll have much trouble with it again barring perhaps a few boss fights or the optional underground boxing matches you can take on for cash. Most of the time will be spent scouring the game's three large open-world maps for books (teaches you new skills), artifacts, medicine (to be redistributed to the needy rather than the Nazi), money caches, notes, and other valuable ancient tchotchkes. You can actually buy and find guides that add each set of collectible to the overall map, though annoyingly there's no way to overlay multiple types at once: if you're moving through a set of ruins while looking for notes, you might find yourself having to come back later for some other collectible type too (unless you're regularly going into the menu to cycle between them, which isn't super efficient).

Beyond collectible hunting, which I suppose is less the focus if you're not an OCD weirdo like myself, there's a handful of "Fieldwork" missions in each of the game's maps that are worth playing through, often revealing much about the regions', characters' or main narrative's backstory or else providing self-contained mini-Indiana (Mini-ana? M-indiana?) Jones adventures, and the "Mysteries", which usually relate to figuring out the combination to a chest or lockbox via a collection of nearby clues. They both tap into the less celebrated aspects of the character whenever he's occasionally required to think and put his degree and/or remarkable polyglottery to good use. You could also just mainline the story but completing all these bonus objectives nets you "adventure points" (sadly, it appears as if the "Indy Quotient" from The Last Crusade/The Fate of Atlantis has been retired) which are poured into learning new skills, provided you have also found the book that teaches it to you. The skills are mostly convenience additions but the ones that improve melee combat or increases your stock of health and stamina are darn close to essential.

The game also looks incredible, owing to MachineGames's skill at their craft and whatever extra funding Bethesda and Microsoft are kicking their way. Indy buys a camera early on and the game provides many opportunities to take a quick snap of the surroundings, sometimes in the service of having a reference for a puzzle you're staring in the face but usually because there's an impressive vista it wants you to memorialize for Indy's journal. The settings not only look sharp but also period-accurate, rendering the ancient ruins and the "modern" 1930s settlements and expedition tents with the same level of care to present a distinct lived-in feeling. The game evidently took some lessons from the newer Hitman games: not only are they a good port of call for learning to do stealth right (which the game kinda does; you don't have to worry about crouch-walking behind cover everywhere once you find the right disguise, for instance) but they have some of the better-realized environments in games to just poke around and explore at your leisure while planning your next infiltration. Getting the feel of Indiana Jones right is absolutely essential for a project like this and MachineGames really outdid themselves when faced with that heavy responsibility; still, after the fine work they did for their future Nazi environs in the Wolfenstein series, I needn't have worried too much.

What impressed me the most, I think, is that with this game Indy looks to have found a niche that is sufficiently different to what Lara Croft and Nathan Drake are doing and yet still perfectly suited to his own skills and background. You can absolutely pull out a revolver and just skip a tough fight—something Indy's done on-film at least once—but I never felt inclined to ever go in guns blazing, and not just because it'd be prohibitively difficult to survive such a reckless approach with a large enough mob. More that Indy's the type to knock a dude out, steal his look (literally), try to pass off as a particularly scruffy Nazi or Italian fascist with a few greetings in the appropriate language, and then only revert to his classic leather jacket and fedora combo when there's tomb purloining to be done. The trademark whip, too, finds ample applications throughout the game between being used as a grappling hook and a weapon that can take down an unsuspecting enemy at range or else slap the gun out of their hands. If Indy's not doing the thing where he's looking down and wagging his finger as his mouth slowly catches up to his brain and the revelatory epiphany it just conceived, that moment is sure to come along again shortly, such is the game's understanding of the character of Indiana Jones and how he's equally at home doing parkour to escape arrow traps and giant boulders (fun idea to have that classic Raiders intro as the prologue, if a little on the nose) as he is poring over a notebook full of ancient symbols.

Even though the game could be a bit glitchy (I missed out on my last achievement due to one; then again, if you're the type of idiot who chooses to play games new, caveat emptor) and certainly has room for improvement in the way it handles certain mechanics like map tech or the loquacity of its companions, as a long-time Indy fan who has long had a checkered history with his various video game adaptations I can safely say that The Great Circle not only "gets it" but absolutely stands on its own as a major contender in the plunder 'em up genre. Really hope MG gets to keep the license for a while longer. (Rating: 5 out of 5.)

Current GOTY

1. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
2. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
3. Another Crab's Treasure
4. Pepper Grinder
5. Botany Manor
6. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank
7. Doronko Wanko

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