Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: MachineGames Finds the Whip

Indiana Jones has been a games franchise for longer than most of the people writing about it have been alive, and for most of that history he was a point-and-click hero, not an action one — Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and the Last Crusade adventure game both came out of LucasArts’ own SCUMM engine, the same house style that gave the world Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle. MachineGames, the Wolfenstein reboot studio, clearly knows this history, because Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a first-person game with combat in it, but underneath the fisticuffs it is an adventure game wearing a Bethesda-era engine.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. The Great Circle spends most of its runtime asking the player to look at a room, catalogue what’s in it, and work out what a 1930s archaeologist would do with a torch, a crowbar and a notebook — the exact grammar that made Fate of Atlantis a genre landmark, just rendered in three dimensions and first-person instead of point-and-click. It is the strongest Indiana Jones game since that 1992 adventure because it copies its priorities.

The Whip as a Traversal Verb

The signature new tool is the whip, and MachineGames resists the temptation to make it a combat gimmick first. It’s a traversal and utility instrument before it’s a weapon — swinging across gaps, snagging ledges, disarming enemies from range, pulling levers you can’t reach. Combat use exists and works fine as a crowd-control option, wrapping around an enemy’s leg to yank them off balance, but it’s clearly secondary to the game’s real interest, which is using the whip to open up navigation options in environments built with multiple routes through them.

That design choice keeps the whip from becoming the over-tuned toy that traversal gadgets often become once a studio realises how satisfying they are to use (see: the grapple hook problem across a decade of open-world design). Here it stays a tool with a job, deployed when the environment calls for it rather than as a constant fallback, which keeps its novelty intact across a campaign that runs well past twenty hours.

Puzzles Without a Cursor

The game’s real achievement is translating point-and-click logic into first-person space without losing what made it satisfying. Indy carries a notebook that fills automatically with sketches, translated inscriptions and half-formed theories as you explore, functioning as the externalised memory a mouse cursor used to provide when you could click every object on screen to see what Indy thought of it. The puzzles that come out of this — matching symbols across two ruins on opposite sides of the map, working out a mechanism from a diagram sketched decades earlier by a rival archaeologist — are recognisably descended from the inventory-combination logic of Lucasfilm’s own adventure output, the doctrine the desk has traced back to the SCUMM era itself, just staged in real, walkable spaces instead of painted backdrops.

What’s genuinely new is how the first-person camera changes the pacing of discovery. A point-and-click game reveals its clues instantly, the moment you click the right hotspot; The Great Circle makes you physically walk the environment, crouch under an arch, tilt your head to read an inscription upside down, and that friction — deliberately unhurried — is the game’s closest thing to atmosphere. It slows you into the archaeologist’s headspace rather than the action hero’s.

The Case Against Combat

Combat is the part of The Great Circle that critics have been fairest about calling the weakest link, and it’s a fair complaint. Fisticuffs are serviceable — Indy throws a decent haymaker, and improvised-weapon takedowns (frying pans, wine bottles, the whip itself) have a satisfying, scrappy weight to them — but the system never develops the depth the puzzle design does. Stealth is the more reliably enjoyable option: distracting guards, hiding bodies, threading patrol routes through Vatican corridors or Himalayan monasteries, all of which rewards the same patient observation the puzzles ask for. Straight fights, by contrast, feel like the game briefly forgetting what kind of experience it’s built to deliver.

This isn’t a fatal flaw so much as a sign of where MachineGames’ actual interest lies. A studio that made its name on Wolfenstein’s ultraviolent set-pieces choosing to make combat the least interesting part of its own game, on purpose, is itself a kind of statement — one worth taking as read rather than as an oversight. It also matches the source material more honestly than a shooter would have: the films built Indy’s action scenes around improvisation and escape as often as they built them around a fair fight, and a combat system that plays best when you’re avoiding it entirely is arguably truer to that character than a tightly balanced third-person cover shooter would have been.

The difficulty options extend to combat too, and the game is generous about letting players lean almost entirely on stealth and evasion if straight fighting isn’t the draw. That’s a sensible acknowledgement from MachineGames that its own strongest work here is elsewhere, and a rare case of a studio building its difficulty settings around where its game is actually good rather than where the marketing wants the emphasis to sit.

Where the Adventure Lives

The Great Circle’s globe-trotting structure — Vatican City, a Marshall College campus, sun-scorched Thai ruins, wintry mountain monasteries, a occupied Shanghai — gives MachineGames the chance to vary its puzzle grammar by location without ever losing the notebook-and-observation throughline. Each region introduces its own local logic (a market’s rumour network standing in for a hint system in one, a monastery’s ritual calendar gating access in another) rather than reskinning the same fetch-and-combine loop in a new coat of paint, and that variety is what keeps a long campaign from calcifying into a checklist.

It helps that the sense of place is treated as more than set-dressing. Crowds have their own rhythms, market stalls sell region-appropriate goods, and the environmental storytelling — a half-packed suitcase, a coded ledger left open — does the same quiet characterisation work that the genre’s point-and-click ancestors did with a single well-placed background object.

The Notebook as a Difficulty Setting

One of the quieter design decisions in The Great Circle is how much of its difficulty curve lives in the notebook rather than in the puzzles themselves. Turn the hint density up and Indy annotates his own sketches with near-solutions; turn it down and the notebook records only what you’ve directly observed, leaving the connecting logic entirely up to the player. It’s a scalable difficulty system built around information rather than enemy health bars or damage sliders, and it’s a smarter solution to the “adventure games are sometimes obtusely hard” problem than the genre has usually managed. Classic point-and-click design solved this with a hint phone line or, later, a built-in hint button that just gave the answer; The Great Circle instead adjusts how much pattern-recognition work the game does for you, which keeps the puzzle-solving satisfaction intact even on the easier settings.

This matters because the genre’s history is littered with puzzles that were less clever than obscure — the moon logic that made 1990s adventure games infamous for players resorting to strategy guides. MachineGames clearly studied that failure mode as closely as it studied Fate of Atlantis’ successes, and the result is a game that trusts its own puzzle design enough to let players calibrate how much help they want without ever making the underlying logic feel dumbed down.

Sound and Silence as Clue

The audio design deserves more credit than a first-person adventure game usually gets for this kind of thing. Guard patrol routes are legible from footstep patterns alone before you’ve seen a single patrol pattern icon on a minimap, because there isn’t one — the game leans on diegetic cues rather than UI markers for most of its stealth information, forcing the same kind of attentive listening that a well-built immersive sim demands. Ambient dialogue between guards, half-overheard and only sometimes subtitled, frequently contains the actual solution to a nearby puzzle, rewarding players who treat the soundscape as another readable surface rather than background texture.

It’s a small thing next to the whip and the notebook, but it’s consistent with everything else the game gets right: a refusal to substitute a UI element for a piece of environmental storytelling wherever the two could plausibly do the same job.

Spoilers below

The plot follows Indy across several 1930s flashpoints chasing a network of ancient sites — the titular Great Circle — that a rival archaeologist working in the service of a fascist regime is trying to weaponise ahead of him. The game keeps its supernatural elements restrained by series standards: the power at the centre of the Circle is treated as a genuine mystery the story is comfortable leaving only partially explained, in keeping with the franchise’s long-standing rule that the artefact itself is never really the point. The final stretch resolves the rivalry on personal terms as much as archaeological ones, closing with Indy having gained a network of allies across the countries he’s passed through rather than a single decisive victory.

What to Play Next

The obvious comparison point for anyone who finishes The Great Circle and wants more of the same feeling isn’t another first-person action game — it’s the genre Indy came from. Fate of Atlantis remains playable and is the clearest ancestor on record, built around the same premise of a rival expedition racing Indy to a mythic network of sites, decades before The Great Circle borrowed the structure wholesale and gave it a body to walk around in. The two games make an interesting pair precisely because so little separates their actual puzzle logic; what’s changed is the interface between player and object, not the underlying design philosophy.

The Great Circle is the best evidence in years that Indiana Jones was always better served by a puzzle box than a firing range. If this is the tone you want more of, Grim Fandango is the fullest expression of that same Lucasfilm design philosophy in its native point-and-click form, and Full Throttle makes the case for the same studio’s instinct for cinematic pacing over combat depth.