In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2024, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.
Troy Baker, I owe you an apology. I wasn't really familiar with your game.
Well, that's not true. After the last 15 years of starring roles in high-profile blockbusters like BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us and on and on, it's more that I thought I was too familiar with Troy Baker's game to believe in him as Indiana Jones, imitating the voice of an actor I've been listening to for most of my life. The performance didn't work for me in the trailers, and neither did much of what I saw on screen: The Great Circle looked, in snippets, to be a bit too simplistic, a bit too clunky.
But Indiana Jones and the Great Circle pulls off a magic trick. It is a bit simplistic and a bit clunky, with some very stupid baddies and combat that places more importance on the film accuracy of its meaty punching sound effect than the intricacy of its brawling. And yet I've been playing it at least three hours a night since I started with a weekend binge. Playing it I don't feel like I'm a kid again—I feel like I am actually Indiana Jones, and I mean that with utter sincerity knowing it's the kind of cliche I would roll my eyes at if I read it in someone else's article.
Stop booing me—I'm right!!
Even the best licensed games haven't pulled off stepping into their characters' shoes to the extent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle manages it. Batman: Arkham City and Insomniac's Spider-Man are great videogames, but their power fantasies are a bit more like controlling an action figure than Just Some Guy.
The Great Circle reveres Indiana Jones, but it knows it somehow has to translate the heart of Harrison Ford's "everyman" performance into a game to succeed, and that doesn't work with a normal videogame character who's as elastic as a Nathan Drake, constantly bouncing from one impossibly bombastic setpiece to another. How do you make an Indiana Jones game in a post-Uncharted, post-Tomb Raider world and not make it seem like a faded copy of a copy? You make it an immersive sim.
Forget the PC genre that encompasses the likes of Deus Ex and Dishonored for a second—I can't think of a better pair of words to literally describe exactly what Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is. This game delights in the true fantasy of being Indiana Jones, which is being an explorer and archeologist who himself delights in poking around The Vatican for eight hours looking at frescos and muttering about their history under his breath. Of course he would use a notebook full of drawings and scraps of notes to suss out thousand-year-old puzzles and speak the language wherever he goes. Of course he'd get so caught up in the lust for a new discovery that the bad guys would (briefly) get the better of him. Of course he'd survive half the game's bombastic moments with heroic derring-do and only make it through the rest due to dumb luck or a comedic twist of fate.
I was smitten with The Great Circle early on when it let me loose in The Vatican with little guidance beyond my own curiosity. But the moment I knew it was really something special came hours later, when Indy's first face-to-face confrontation with the big bad was more slapstick than heroic. He falls through the ceiling while attempting to spy on Nazi archeologist Emmerich Voss, then accidentally elbows him in the face while fighting his lackey; Indy's partner, the Italian reporter Gina, almost saves the day, but bonks her head on a shelf. A bullet that narrowly avoids killing Voss's underling instead bullseyes a painting of The Führer.
In trailer clips The Great Circle's cutscenes came off as stilted, but in context they're consciously grounded at the right moments and exaggerated in others, mimicking the mixture of derring-do and goofiness that made Spielberg Spielberg. The spell that animates these scenes is the combination of MachineGames' incredible likeness of Harrison Ford and Troy Baker's performance, somehow eerily authentic without ever crossing over into distracting impressionist territory. When Baker barks out an angry or panicked retort it's so dead-on you could dub the line into one of the movies and I don't think I'd notice.
As astonishingly good as those cutscenes are, The Great Circle's best and boldest choice is still forcing you to play in first-person, with endless deliberate design choices that add a touch of Just Some Guy friction where there would be zero resistance in other games. Pressing a joystick to turn a key in a lock; pressing a button to grab a machine gun by the barrel and wield it as a club; holding up and reloading Indy's revolver one agonizing bullet at a time. Major story beats revolving around arranging the photos you've taken on a table as physical objects. Indy getting his ass beat in just a couple punches if you haven't eaten an adequate amount of biscotti before a fight.
The Great Circle is willing to be a bit slow, a bit obtuse, driven by curiosity rather than setpieces, in ways that feel so anathema to modern big budget videogaming I found myself saying "I can't believe they let them make this" to myself at least once an hour. As Ted Litchfield wrote in PC Gamer's review, it almost mirrors Bethesda's Elder Scrolls games, which "have bad stealth, bad combat, samey dungeons, and uneven skill systems, but sell a fictional world so well, so completely, they're still some of the best RPGs around."
MachineGames is flexing galaxy brain levels of "understanding the assignment" here: The Great Circle nails the spirit of the character so effectively that gameplay weaknesses like "Nazis with zero peripheral vision" don't matter in the slightest when a screen-perfect Indy smirk, a John Williams crescendo, or a puzzle with some bigass ancient gears is never more than a few minutes away.
I expected to feel the same about The Great Circle as I did the last Indiana Jones film, Dial of Destiny—fun and heartfelt in moments, but ultimately little more than a sad attempt to revisit a character who should've been left to rest. Instead even before I've finished this adventure I'm already fantasizing about the next one. MachineGames has figured out all the delicate character work. With that challenge out of the way, imagine how much simmier it could make its second stab at an immersive sim.
Microsoft made the boneheaded decision to deprive the world of more games from Arkane Austin; if anyone over there has any sense, they'll recognize what a special, against-the-odds thing The Great Circle is, and give MachineGames' Indy the tenure he deserves to keep adventuring for many years to come.
