Review: Indiana Jones' excellent new video game

37 hours with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, a game that gives you a hat, a whip and something better

He looks like Harrison Ford and sounds close enough (Troy Baker does the voice). Screenshot: MachineGames/Xbox Game Studios, captured by Game File

It would be correct to call the newest video game from Microsoft/Bethesda’s MachineGames an exemplary Indiana Jones simulator.

You are indeed Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. You can see through his eyes in this globe-spanning adventure that is largely played from a first-person view.

You can crack a whip, punch Nazis, and, when your fedora is knocked from your head, frantically grab it from the floor.

Perhaps all of that might make you feel like you’re Indy—or at least Harrison Ford, dressing up in the trappings of an early 20th-century American treasure hunter (I mean: archaeologist).

But what might it actually feel like to be that guy?

What might it feel like to be a person who can wipe the dust off a stone, rub his fingertips over some engraved Latin or Greek, mutter a translation about how the learned man must stand astride the wind (or must dislodge the third-lowest brick or whatever), then trigger the slow swivel of a slab that reveals a coin of the ancients or at least a priceless porcelain duck?

It is that Indiana Jones experience—the knowing of something esoteric, the confident application of that knowledge, the resulting discovery of something hidden—that the Great Circle, a subtly designed marquee video game, most effectively provides.

Sure, you can run from a boulder at one point in this game, but that’s the obvious, easy stuff.

Through a feat of smart game design that reveals its excellence over more than a dozen hours of play, The Great Circle has a much more inspired way of making its players feel like one of fiction’s most famous adventurers.