Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is an adventure set between the films Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, telling of a mysterious circle of sacred sites scattered across the globe. The game bets on an unusual solution: exploration and combat play out in first person, while climbing, cutscenes, and the most intense moments switch to third person. Indy is no soldier — a gun is very much a last resort; fists, improvised objects, and above all the whip work far better, letting you disarm an opponent, pull yourself up to a ledge, or sweep a guard's legs out from under them. A large part of the game consists of quietly sneaking past guards, solving puzzles in tombs, and leafing through a notebook full of notes and photographs.

The individual areas — the Vatican, Egyptian deserts, Himalayan heights, or the Thai jungle — are designed as semi-open playgrounds, where alongside the main storyline lie optional tasks, lost artifacts, and plenty of nooks rewarding curiosity. On Xbox Series X|S the game runs on the studio's proven engine with excellent lighting and ray tracing, so shafts of dusty light in underground temples rank among the most beautiful images of the year. The music quotes the iconic fanfare motif only sparingly, so that each use carries weight, and the lead character's voice acting comes across very convincingly close to the film original.

Critics received the game excellently, praising above all its faithfulness to the source material's tone — the game is adventurous, funny, and, at the right moment, serious, without trying to be a modern action shooter. It also showed that MachineGames can do something other than fast-paced action. Today it's one of the best licensed games of recent years and a title that can delight even players who have no attachment to the Indiana Jones brand at all. There's also a camera used to document finds, and a system of small rewards for completed challenges that makes it worthwhile to explore areas off the main path too. Difficulty, moreover, can be set separately for combat and for puzzles.