The opening level of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a divisive one for new players. For Indy nerds obsessed with the films, it’s pretty neat to slowly realize you’re smack dab in the middle of the series' most venerated scenes. On the other hand, though, opening the best Indiana Jones adventure in more than three decades with a set piece lifted from his past exploits creates early concern that the rest of the game might be fixated on reiterating the classics.
Jerk Gustafsson, game director of The Great Circle, expresses no regrets about it.
“It's the greatest movie opening of all time,” Gustafsson tells Inverse. “You can also argue that it's a bit of a slow start. But for me, it sets the pacing and tone of the game in a good way, especially since we have been so focused trying to re-imagine that 80s matinee adventure.”
Those who stick with the game through to its end will realize that there is more to this on-the-nose crowd-pleasing tutorial. There’s a deeper thematic through-line tying the scene to Indy’s character arc in The Great Circle. But he admits it’s also about the fan service.
Making A Movie, But Bigger
“We tried to focus a little bit on what the cameras don’t show you [in the film],” he says. “Just the idea of walking around, being able to explore the environment, adding a few more Easter eggs to build it out. Not too much, because we really wanted to stay true to what the opening was in the movie. But enough so that you can get to experience it in a 3D environment.”
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is all about bringing back that feeling. Every decision Machine Games made about its story, the performances, and even its level design is in service of making the player feel like putting on the brown fedora themselves. Thankfully, as its rave reviews have confessed, the Sweden-based developer nailed it.
The bulk of The Great Circle takes place in 1937, just a few months after the events of the first film. Across five films, a TV show, several video games and novels, Machine Games could have set their story anywhere in the series’ half-century worth of lore. However, there was an intention in setting it so close to the first film, according to Gustafsson.
“We really wanted to use the Indiana Jones that Harrison Ford portrayed in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where he’s still a little bit younger,” he explained. “Where we could focus on what makes the character so interesting: this insane obsession he has.”
Making It Personal
One of the best parts of the game is that it's not laser-focused on trying to convince the player it's an adventure just like the movies. It just is one. And one of the coolest ways that it does this is by following up on its place in the timeline in interesting ways. The game doesn’t just reference Raiders and The Last Crusade for fun. Both of those movies’ story beats hang like a specter over this version of Indy. He’s respectful but impulsive when it comes to finding lost artifacts. He’s regretful that his relationship with Marion Ravenwood has fallen apart. Like any person post-breakup, he’s eager to get away from his feelings by pouring himself into his work.
“It’s another reason we start the game with the Raiders scene,” Gustafsson says. “It’s him finding this Golden Idol. He is so obsessed with finding these things. And this is actually one of the failures, one of the things he lost and never got back.”
Gustafsson said the team is thankful to LucasFilm, which Machine Games’ worked closely with throughout development. He said none of the team’s ideas for its stories or set pieces were shot down before the final game went gold. It’s a testament to LucasFilm’s openness to the project and the developer’s understanding of the franchise.
“We have felt that we have had the freedom to work and find our own ways to build out that story,” he says. “They have also provided a lot of feedback and come up with a lot of good ideas.”
A Game For Explorers
An underrated part of what makes The Great Circle so faithful is the sense of travel. Indy goes to Vatican City, Egypt, Shanghai, and more during his quest. These environments feel substantial. You can spend hours in Vatican City before triggering its final mission uncovering mysteries and secret caverns not seen by human eyes in thousands of years.
Retaining a sense that the unknown is just around the corner (in the same way the movies do) without feeling bloated like so many other big budget games is deeply refreshing. Gustafsson says it took some ingenuity from developers to create that illusion.
“These are actually the biggest environments we have done for any game,” he says. “It was a little bit experimental from our side just because we didn't really have the experience.”
The team started but building levels specifically around the golden path of its main story quests. The sizes of the worlds were set early in development. They simply turned the dial on how dense these levels were with NPCs, mysteries, and side quests once they were further along.
“This was the first time we actually had a start, an end, all the key beats of the story, and all the big missions that we wanted to include in the story, and then allowed ourselves to be flexible and add more to that,” Gustafsson said.
Setting those parameters early helps The Great Circle feel like it's using its runtime as wisely as the films do. And that was simply result of smart and well-planned development, preventing the kind of scope creep that has undone so many other big-budget games.
“We have always been very careful because we're not super big as a team,” he says. “We don't want to do work that we throw away. We want to make sure that we have a plan from the beginning, that that we can actually work with and that we can deliver on.”
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the sum of so many great parts. From the inspired, unorthodox design decisions that help it stand apart from other games in its genre. To the faithfulness to recreating the feel of its source material without retreading too much on what came before it. Machine Games did a tremendous job bringing this beloved character back to life.
