Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure is a graphic adventure adaptation of the third film, though it doesn't settle for simply retelling the screenplay. The game follows the search for the Holy Grail from Venice through an Austrian castle to a desert temple, but adds its own locations, alternative solutions, and an IQ point system that tallies the player's score based on how elegantly they got through each problem. Controls are classic SCUMM: verbs at the bottom, inventory next to them, and sentences built with the cursor.

The most interesting part is precisely that variability. Many situations have more than one solution — some can be reached through trickery, others through persuasion, and others simply with your fists — and the game even includes simple close-quarters combat, where the player defends against an opponent's attacks. Anyone who plays it a second time via a different path gets a different score, which was by no means common at the time. Part of the experience is also Henry Jones's Grail Diary, a printed booklet with notes and sketches, without which the final puzzles involving the catacombs and markings are hard to solve; the period copy protection genuinely served the atmosphere here, for once.

On DOS the game was released in EGA graphics with backgrounds that surprisingly well captured the film's composition, and with music based on the well-known themes of the source material. A sound card made it a considerably more cinematic experience than the PC speaker. At the time it was received as proof that a licensed game didn't have to be a cash-in, and a few years later LucasArts followed it up with the even better Fate of Atlantis. Today Last Crusade is somewhat harsher and less forgiving than the studio's later titles — you can die and get stuck here — but its emphasis on player choice and multiple paths to the same goal reads surprisingly modern. Also interesting is how the game handles pacing: calm investigation in libraries and archives alternates with escapes from guards, so the player never lingers anywhere long enough to get bored. Among licensed adventure games of its era, it still ranks among the best.