Don’t you just love it when a developer treats a renowned film series with the respect it deserves? Last year’s Robocop: Rogue City was a great example of this recently, giving fans the chance to step into Robocop’s, err, Roboboots and visit some of its most iconic locations, as well as meet up with familiar faces from the movies. Well, you can add Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to the list of great game film adaptations, as that’s the exact vibe I got after playing three hours of MachineGames’ upcoming Indy adventure at a recent press event.
Indiana Jones and the Great CircleDeveloper: MachineGamesPublisher: Bethesda SoftworksAvailability: Out on 6th December (Spring 2025 for PS5)Platforms: Xbox Series X/S, Game Pass and PC (Windows, Steam)
Right from its introductory chapter, The Great Circle opens with a wonderful recreation of Marshall College, the place where Indiana Jones teaches wannabe archaeologists when he’s not off stealing weird things that have been supposedly touched by Jesus or something. As you might expect, it’s stuffed full of Indy easter eggs, and on the big beefy PC I was playing on, it looked absolutely stunning. If my preview time hadn’t had a strict time limit, I think I could have spent a good hour or so poking around the office and classrooms and just drinking in all the little details (honestly, this game is begging for a VR mode, just saying).
There was another very familiar face there, too, in the form of Marcus Brody. Both he and Indy chat quite a bit in this opening section, and you can see developer MachineGames has paid just as much attention to The Great Circle’s character models voices. You’ll be pleased to hear (literally) that Troy Baker does a great gruff Indy voice, and sounds pretty much spot on with a young Harrison Ford. In the wrong hands, this might have been the most distracting thing about The Great Circle, but thankfully MachineGames has chosen wisely on this one.
It’s during this opening chapter that we also get introduced to the game’s potential villain: Locus, who’s played by Tony Todd from Candyman fame (although I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a twist there and he ends up being a good guy, he just has that kind of vibe). Indy bumps into Locus as he’s burglarising artefacts from the college displays and, after a brief scuffle which ends in Indy getting knocked out, we’re introduced to how The Great Circle’s puzzles work. You see, The Great Circle wants you to feel like an adventurer and an archaeologist, and a large portion of its puzzle can only be solved through a bit of detective work, and by paying attention to both visual and aural clues around your environment.