The most Indiana Jones feeling imaginable? It’s when you’ve just released a mythical artefact from its ancient stone vessel using an intricate pattern of lights and mirrors. As you hold it reverently to a single shaft of sunlight, taking in its magical resonance, your over-excited accomplice jumps onto a nearby rock throne. And – uh-oh – a deep rumbling fills the tomb…
There are plenty such Indie-tastic moments to be had in Bethesda’s enthralling new adventure Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, coming to Xbox, PC and Steam on December 9. You’ll be dropped into a pit full of scorpions with no apparent way out. Find yourself in fist fights with giant monks over mysterious statuettes. Swinging over bottomless pits on an unsecured whip and stalking fascists around the Vatican with only a discarded bottle of Chateauneuf-Du-Pape as a weapon.
As the publishers behind The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Dishonoured, Wolfenstein and The Evil Within (among many others), Bethesda know a thing or two about creating immersive game worlds and their full weight has been brought to bear on Indiana Jones’ first gaming excursion in 15 years (and even back then he was largely Lego). NME donned its gratis brown fedora for a two-hour hands-on session with the game in an artefact-festooned replica of Raiders Of The Lost Ark’s Marshall College, and emerged feeling stung at the ankles, sore and dusty from crawling through ancient crypts and gasping to whip-crack away at more pesky Nazis.
It’s as 1930s as gaming has ever got
Having inspired such legendary gaming franchises as Tomb Raider and Uncharted, Indiana Jones’ return to consoles was always going to have to be pretty jaw-dropping to hold its own. And in that sense, Bethesda absolutely deliver. Basing their action between the events of Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981) and The Last Crusade (1989), they concoct a fittingly widescreen and globe-bounding storyline. The theft of a mummified cat from Jones’ Marshall College exhibits by the aforementioned massive monk leads our lash-happy hero on an adventure to track down artefacts hidden in mystical locations encircling the globe: the Vatican, the Giza Pyramids, the Himalayas, Shanghai and the Sukhothai temples of Thailand.
So far, so Tomb Raider 3, but Bethesda have created locations with far more intrinsic authenticity than any Lara Croft or Nathan Drake outing before it. With access to Lucasfilm’s Indiana Jones archive they’ve faithfully recreated maps and scenes from the original films and gone to great lengths to ensure that the details are historically accurate, right down to the sort of paper that the in-game notes would have been written on, or the breed of scorpion that might come gushing out of a sarcophagus at you. The effect, alongside the game’s warm, richly rendered graphics palate, is to land you – first person and prone to swift exhaustion if you’re a run-away type – in an earthy and antiquated world that feels as real as any in gaming. They might as well include an official honorary PhD in archaeology with the first DLC.
It features the best of all (open) worlds
Elden Ring has recently shown the way in merging complex linear maps with open world segments and, while The Great Circle seems far from as expansive and involving as that mega-masterpiece, some crucial lessons have been learned. Our stalks through the introductory Marshall College section and a subsequent creep-and-dash around the lesser-trodden ramparts of the Vatican were pleasingly claustrophobic linear set-pieces.
But our arrival in Giza set us loose in a respectable sized (literal) sandbox where we could either take on the tasks at hand in a foolhardy death-or-glory rush or sneak around taking photos, scouring bustling town markets and gathering items – disguises, lighters, the Adventure Books which unlock skill upgrades – to help you survive once you venture into Nazi camps or the critter-crawling labyrinth beneath the Sphinx.
It’s an amalgam approach, akin to recent Tomb Raiders, which tempers what could have been an overly tense and pushy experience, giving the player the chance to set their own pace and sink into these stunning locations without worrying about there being a guard with a big bastard Alsatian around every corner.
Puzzles are authentically buried
In most action-adventure games, the puzzle rooms feel like you’ve stepped out of the game into an alternate dimension ruled by MENSA. They’re often glaringly out-of-place: an enemy-free cavern full of light beams, incomplete statues and switches plonked in the middle of what, until that point, has essentially been a war zone. The Great Circle includes its fair share of those – our session covering the early game was heavy on mirror-angling work – but often included far more subtle puzzles embedded in the environment.
You might crawl past a sleeping blackshirt beside a roaring fire, only to later discover that the hanging artwork nearby is a mini-puzzle. The puzzles we were presented with were pretty straightforward, but judging by an as-yet-unreleased trailer previewed during the session, later areas involve far more elaborate, testing and – crucially – unobvious mental challenges. Even navigating the environment itself appears to become a puzzle, unless it later becomes routine to whip away drainage plugs or create your own swing points with spears from afar.
Combat is whatever you make it
Bethesda might describe it as an “adventure-action game”, but The Great Circle favours stealth and problem-solving over fisticuffs. When smarts fail you though, there are a vast array of options for taking down the Third Reich’s most unsportsmanlike grunts. With your pistol only likely to attract more enemies, Indie’s trademark whip is great for disarming or ankle-yanking opponents before finishing them off with a five-knuckle firework display. Or the entire game is littered with a vast array of weaponry, making it a fun mission to discover which makes the best head-masher: a candelabra, a hammer, an acoustic guitar or a vintage Stradivarius?
‘Indiana Jones And The Great Circle’ is out December 9 for PC and Xbox