There’s a fairly good chance that you, like us, keep forgetting that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a first-person game. Each time we see any footage, it’s a jarring moment to remember that this isn’t a reskinned Tomb Raider or Uncharted, but instead puts us directly inside Dr. Jones’ head. This is exacerbated by so much of the stuff we’ve seen in trailers constantly jumping to cinematic third-person views, given how odd of an angle it is when trying to show off the game. But now we’ve seen ten minutes of in-game footage, and it’s starting to make more sense.
At this week’s Gamescom, developer MachineGames, the force behind games like 2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order and its sequel, described what has been shown before as highlighting their approach to “building an immersive narrative, full of twists and turns and exciting set-pieces.” But today we would see the enigmatic “gameplay.” They wanted to show off “what it is like to actually play as Indiana Jones and experience his adventure, to look through his eyes.” So it was perhaps unfortunate that this was immediately followed up by yet more footage of the grave robber smashing an ancient statue to recover a secret doohickey, all via a staged, third-person view.
This continued on as Indy’s thievery caused traps to trigger, closing the doors and filling the room with sand. But lo, a high window eventually comes within reach, and here, at last, we’re actually seeing the world through the behatted one’s eyes and leap forward into…a scripted series of slips and slides as the temple falls down around him.
OK, I’m being mean, but they set me up. After this, we do at last start to see some actual footage of the game as it will be experienced, and it’s a far more controlled and considered game than I was expecting. At some points, it appeared to play more like a first-person adventure game, with Indy inspecting scenes for clues, picking up objects to examine, and attempting to piece together where he needs to be. And where he needs to be is stopping evil Nazi rival explorer Emmerich Voss from finding a series of relics and returning them to his Fuhrer.
This all begins when Voss breaks into the doctor’s Massachusetts university and steals one such relic, and we begin trying to find out what he’s up to. In the aftermath of the break-in, we see Indy picking up photographs, looking through papers, snapping photographs to unlock more details about various items and areas, and arguing with Italian journalist Gina, who is only interested in accompanying him to find her sister.
But it’s not all poking around in ancient ruins and halls of academia. The other most joyously repeated theme of what we were shown was hitting bad people on the back of the head with shovels. There seems to be a strong emphasis on improvisation, with objects lying around in the world available to be grabbed and used as a one-off advantage. Those shovels, for instance, shatter at the handle once they’ve been walloped around an unsuspecting head, and Indy tosses the remains aside. The same goes for metal bars used to knock loose bricks out of walls, or staffs thrown across ravines into the rock wall, to then be swung on with Indy’s whip.
Shovels weren’t the only means of combat, of course. The real focus was fisticuffs, with fights playing out as a sort of boxing minigame, you and the enemy exchanging blows, attempting blocks, and general biffing noses. Such moments would often begin with Indiana using his whip to pull at a buddy’s ankle to bring them to the floor, and then engaging in pugilism on their recovery, swapping punches until one of you is down.
Talking of Indy being down, in a highlight of the shown footage we saw our hero losing a fight and falling to the ground, but then thanks to a skill—True Grit—gained and added to his skill tree, he was able to make a last-ditch effort to reach out for his iconic hat and rally himself for one more try. It felt so very, very Indiana Jones.
It’s also worth noting that Indy’s perspective is not stubbornly first-person, after all. When he climbs, it switches out to third-person view, looking extremely like a Tomb Raider game as he Lara Crofts his way around ledges and climbs vines. It’s almost as if…it could have been a better perspective? But the insistence on “seeing through his eyes” prevails. It’ll end up being a combination of the two as we experience the larger challenges, climbing around vast obstacles to solve elaborate puzzles.. At one point we saw Doc Jones pouring wine into ancient bowls to reveal secret numbers, then finding routes to reach a huge raised frieze of Christ and adjusting levers to match the code.
Honestly, watching the footage and realizing that this is a slower, more focused game than the frantic cutscenes we’ve seen before have suggested, has made me much more excited to play it. Stealthing into a room, ker-blamming a baddie with garden equipment, and then using a whip to kwa-ping a gun out of another enemy’s hand looks really rather tremendous, especially when such action is interspersed with both exploration and puzzle solving. As sound director Pete Ward puts it, “The focus of this game is adventure,” with a desire that players find their own uses for the tools the game offers.
I’m much more excited now to return to 1937 having seen this footage, to see how well this mix of approaches can meld together, especially with the good news that Troy Baker’s Harrison Ford impression holds up much better than I’d previously thought. This could…maybe…actually be one to get really excited about. Although I’ve still no idea what’s so great about the circle.