Now that more than a year has passed since its original release, I'm sure many people have slept through Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. First released for Xbox consoles and PC in December 2024 – meaning it missed out on nominations at the Game Awards – critics praised MachineGames' first-person adventure while a small, but very passionate audience of gamers did the same.
Additions will jump on the bandwagon with the final PS5 port, while earlier this month we saw the brilliant immersive sim arrive on the Nintendo Switch 2. It doesn't look or play like other platforms, but the fantasy of exploring different locations as a great archeologist remains. But what makes it so great? Well, to discuss that properly, I have to go back in time and talk about a game called Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, the 2004 cult classic that laid much of the foundation for the Great Circle.
How Indiana Jones learns from Riddick's history
Developed by Starbreeze Studios (whose seven former employees would found MachineGames in 2010), Escape from Butcher Bay is an action-adventure stealth game where you play as the titular hero Riddick as you attempt to escape from the galaxy's most notorious prison. Acting as a prequel to Pitch Black, you're treated as just another inmate within a wider system of criminals. From the second you're thrown into your cell to the moment you finally escape the clutches of imprisonment, it feels like a living, breathing space.
The environment is clear when exploring corridors or chambers or loitering in the yard, made more effective when you engage in conversation or hide in places you shouldn't purely to progress. Vin Diesel's gruff performance makes it feel authentic, with the cast rounded out by names like Cole Hauser, Dwight Schultz and Xjibit. Starbreeze created one of the best licensed games of all time, laying the groundwork for future immersive sims.
It might just be a normal shooter, but it chose to give us a game world where you can pick up and interact with objects, talk to multiple characters, and have to be really inventive in your thinking in order to progress. Its influence from classics like Half-Life and Thief: The Dark Project is obvious, but it also builds on them.
The little things you can find in the corners of each room or the conversations going on without your involvement add a lot to the world building, just like the exploration in The Great Circle informs the best of that game. This DNA can be traced from Riddick on the sequel Assault on Dark Athena to finally working on Wolfenstein at MachineGames. Although it was more of a straight-laced shooter, it still rewarded constant exploration and a constant desire to lose yourself in the world instead of exploding at everything you see.
When I jumped into Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, I was immediately reminded of Riddick. How Indy moves, interacts with the environment, punches his enemies, solves puzzles feels like a generational leap to the Butcher Bay classic. Wherever I go in this game there's a reason to explore or spawn in places that beg to be combed. That's when it hit me that the two things that both of these games do so well is interactivity.
Few games do as much interactivity as Big Circle
The Great Circle's campaign is divided into several large locations that you are free to explore. It presents you with a central mystery to solve, but beyond that there are individual quests or plenty of trinkets waiting to be discovered. Disguise can be used to access certain areas and avoid being jumped by Nazis when you least expect it. What begins as poking your head curiously into new realms transforms into an interconnected journey through vast playgrounds of unpredictable destruction. So many things can be picked up and instantly used as weapons while still being layered enough to always feel satisfying.
Yes, like most modern triple-A games, you can be told what to do and where to go if you're not in the mood to mess around, but the real joy is how much freedom it gives you to make all of its mechanics your own. Stopping to take pictures of discoveries, go to new places, and discover countless secrets is something I always felt engaged and rewarded with. I hesitate to call it a true immersive sim, but it certainly borrows from the genre as much as the Riddick games did to inform the depth of its game design.
It's so incredibly well executed that it chastises me that so few people seem to be talking about it since launch. Maybe the iconic IP doesn't trap the selling point with mechanics that are more involved. It demands a bit more attention than something like Uncharted or Yotei's Ghost, but it's very worthwhile to learn how it holds up. I'm just finishing up my time in the Vatican during my PS5 playthrough and can't help but realize I missed out on so many great moments when I first played on Xbox last year. Along with the DLC there were whole areas, cutscenes, and scenes waiting for me that I have yet to properly delve into.
If you're looking for a modern blockbuster that plays like nothing else out there and lets you drop into many different playgrounds with engaging mechanics, I can't recommend it enough. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle didn't set the world on fire when it hit the shelves, but I can already tell that it will go down in history as a classic.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
- issued
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December 9, 2024
- ESRB
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Juvenile / Blood and gore, drug references, mild language, violence, in-game purchases
- developer(s)
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Machine games
