Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

The decision that makes this work is that guns are bad. You can pick one up, it holds a few rounds, and firing it brings everyone in the region running. What you actually have is a whip, an improvised object, and a willingness to hit someone with a frying pan — and the fights are choreographed around that so completely that the fistfighting has real timing and weight.

Puzzles that respect the premise

MachineGames could have made a shooter with a hat on it. Instead the majority of the runtime is exploration and puzzle-solving in large, semi-open regions built around real locations, and the puzzles are properly designed — you photograph a carving, cross-reference it in a notebook, and work out a mechanism, with no waypoint doing it for you.

The Vatican section in particular is the best thing of its kind since the older Tomb Raider games, a genuine warren of connected spaces with three or four ways into most of them.

Fistfights won with a frying pan

Too many

Field notes collected

Most of them

Times a gun helped

Twice

Troy Baker is doing an impression and it works

The performance is unmistakably an impersonation of Harrison Ford and after about twenty minutes it stops reading as impression and starts reading as the character. The writing supports it — this Indy is tired, funny, and better at talking his way out of rooms than shooting his way through them.

Where it slips

The stealth sections that gate several story beats are the weakest material, with detection rules loose enough to feel arbitrary and instant-fail moments in a game that otherwise never punishes improvisation. The difficulty sliders let you turn this down, which is a good design accommodation and also an admission.

The final act also narrows into corridors after twenty hours of open regions.

The verdict

Thirty-four hours and the best licensed game in a decade. It is a puzzle-adventure with fistfights, which is the correct thing for this character to be, and almost nobody else would have made it.

Play with puzzle hints off and stealth difficulty low. That is the game.