Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Review: A Pulp Adventure That Earns Its Place

A Story Told So Well the Perspective Stops Mattering

Let’s address the elephant in the temple right away. This hub is a celebration of story-driven third-person action games, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is, for most of its runtime, a first-person game. By the letter of the law, it shouldn’t be here.

But exceptions prove the rule.

The Great Circle dances out of line and earns its spot anyway — not on a technicality, but on the single thing this whole hub actually cares about: how well the story is told. MachineGames understood something a lot of bigger studios forget. The camera angle is a delivery mechanism. The thing being delivered is what matters. And what they deliver here is the most confident, pulpy, genuinely Indiana Jones adventure I’ve had since I was hunched over a beige PC clicking my way through Fate of Atlantis in the nineties.

So yes, you’re mostly looking through Indy’s eyes instead of over his shoulder. Stick with me. By hour three you stop noticing, because the storytelling is doing the heavy lifting that perspective usually gets credit for.

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1937, Between the Films, Exactly Where Indy Belongs

The game is set in 1937, slotted neatly between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. That’s not a throwaway detail — it’s the whole personality of the thing.

This is peak-era Indiana Jones. Fedora, leather jacket, whip, a satchel full of curiosity and bad decisions. The Nazis are the bad guys, the McGuffin is suitably mystical, and the plot kicks off the only way an Indy story should: with someone breaking into a museum at night and stealing something they absolutely should not have touched.

From there it becomes a proper globe-trot. The Vatican, the Egyptian desert, the mountains of the Himalayas, Sukhothai in Thailand. Each location is dense, hand-built, and stuffed with detail that rewards the player who pokes around rather than sprints to the next objective marker. It is, in the best sense, a tourist’s game — the kind that wants you to stop and read the plaque on the wall.

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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (PS5/Xbox) (opens in a new tab)

The full pulp adventure on console. Globe-trotting puzzles, the whip, and Troy Baker doing a frankly uncanny Harrison Ford.

The story itself is pure pulp serial, and that’s a compliment. There’s an ancient mystery spanning the globe, a mismatched ally in journalist Gina, a memorably oily antagonist, and a steady drip of “wait, what’s that” reveals. It never tries to be prestige television. It tries to be a Saturday matinee with you in the driver’s seat, and it nails the tone with a precision that frankly embarrasses the last two films.

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Troy Baker Does the Impossible

Let’s talk about the man in the hat. Troy Baker plays Indiana Jones, and replacing Harrison Ford in everyone’s head is one of the hardest assignments in voice acting. Baker doesn’t impersonate Ford so much as channel him — the dry asides, the put-upon sighs, the way Indy is always slightly annoyed that the world keeps making him punch Nazis when he’d rather be reading.

Within ten minutes you stop hearing “an actor doing Indy” and start hearing Indy. It is one of the best performances in the medium this year, and it’s a huge part of why the first-person framing works. You’re not watching a character. You’re being a character whose voice you trust completely.

The supporting cast holds up too. The writing gives Indy real chemistry with Gina, and the banter does the thing good adventure writing always does — it tells you who these people are while they’re busy escaping a collapsing tomb.

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The Gameplay Loop: Whip, Puzzle, Sneak, Punch, Repeat

Here’s how a typical hour plays out, and why it scratches a very specific itch.

You arrive somewhere gorgeous. You explore. You find a mystery — a sealed door, an astronomical mechanism, a riddle carved into stone. You solve it using clues scattered around the environment, your notebook, your camera, and your brain. You use the whip to swing across gaps, yank weapons out of guards’ hands, and occasionally trip a goon into a fountain. You sneak past or knock out patrols. When stealth fails, as it inevitably does, you throw fists — and there’s a satisfying, scrappy weight to clocking a guard with a frying pan you grabbed off a table.

The puzzles are the standout, and they’re where the LucasArts DNA shines brightest. These aren’t tutorialized box-pushing. They make you observe, cross-reference, and occasionally photograph something in one room to understand a mechanism in another. They respect your intelligence. For anyone who spent their childhood stuck on an adventure-game puzzle until the answer suddenly clicked at 2am, this is a powerful nostalgia button — pressed gently and often.

The photography mechanic deserves a nod too. Indy documents the world with his camera, and it’s woven into both puzzles and the general joy of being a curious archaeologist. It’s a small thing that makes you feel like the character instead of just controlling him.

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The Point-and-Click Ghost in the Machine

I need to get personal for a paragraph, because it’s why this game landed harder for me than its review scores might suggest it should.

I am a long-time, slightly embarrassing fan of the classic Indiana Jones point-and-click adventures. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992) is, to this day, one of my favourite games ever made — a smart, funny, branching adventure that treated Indy as a thinker first and a brawler second. For years, every new Indy game felt like it was chasing the action of the films and forgetting the adventure of those old LucasArts classics.

The Great Circle is the first modern Indiana Jones game that remembers. The puzzle-led pacing, the environmental storytelling, the gentle humor, the sense that you’re solving a mystery rather than just shooting your way through one — it’s all here, dressed up in 2024 production values. Playing it felt like the Fate of Atlantis kid in me got handed the budget he always dreamed about.

If you have no nostalgia for those games, you’ll still enjoy this. But if you do, brace yourself, because it hits a nerve you forgot you had.

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Xbox Series X Console (opens in a new tab)

Where the Great Circle launched first and runs beautifully. The natural home if you live in the Game Pass ecosystem.

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Where It Wobbles — Why This Is a 9, Not a 10

I love this game. I also can’t, in good conscience, hand it the same 10 I gave Red Dead Redemption 2, and honesty is the whole point of this blog.

The first-person melee and stealth is where the seams show. Punching feels fun in short bursts but gets repetitive, and the first-person view occasionally makes brawls feel cramped and a little janky — you’ll throw a hook at a guard who’s somehow standing inside your elbow. The stealth is serviceable rather than great; enemy awareness can be inconsistent, and the loop of “knock out the patrol, wait, knock out the next patrol” leans on a thin set of tools.

There are also a few open-ish hub areas that drag. The Great Circle is at its absolute best when it’s tightly directed — a great puzzle in a great location. When it opens up and asks you to wander a larger zone chasing scattered objectives, the pacing sags a little. It’s never bad. It’s just a noticeable dip from the highs.

None of this breaks the game. It’s the difference between a flawless masterpiece and a delight — and “delight” is exactly the right word for the Great Circle.

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The Dad Angle — A Game You Can Actually Share

Here’s the part that genuinely sets the Great Circle apart in this hub: it’s rated T for Teen, and that changes everything about how it fits into real dad life.

Most of the games I gush about here are after-the-kids-are-asleep affairs — too violent, too dark, too much to have running while a seven-year-old wanders through the living room. The Great Circle is different. The violence is adventure-movie violence: punch-ups, narrow escapes, the occasional Nazi getting his comeuppance. It’s the Raiders register, not the Last of Us register. There’s some language and Indy smokes, hence the T rating, but it plays out much like watching the films together.

That means this is a game you can play with an older kid on the couch beside you, working out the puzzles as a team. My inner archaeologist and an actual child can both enjoy “what does that symbol mean” — and that shared-screen energy is rare and precious. It’s the closest thing this hub has to a family adventure, and I don’t say that lightly.

On time investment: the main story runs a tidy 15 to 20 hours, with optional mysteries pushing a thorough run past 30. That’s a refreshingly finishable length in an era of 100-hour bloat. You can actually complete this one before the next big release buries it.

On platform: it launched on Xbox and PC first and arrived on PS5 later. All three versions are excellent. If you’re a Game Pass household, it’s a no-brainer there; if you’re a PlayStation family, the PS5 port doesn’t shortchange you in the slightest.

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PlayStation 5 Console (opens in a new tab)

The PS5 version arrived later and looks and plays just as well. The right pick if you're already in the PlayStation family.

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Why the Great Circle Earns Its Place

So we circle back to the question we opened with. Why is a first-person game sitting in a hub built to celebrate third-person, story-driven action?

Because the rules were never really about the camera. They were about whether a game uses its medium to tell a story worth being inside. The Great Circle does exactly that. It puts you behind Indy’s eyes, hands you a whip and a notebook, and trusts you to be curious. It tells a pulpy, globe-trotting, lovingly-crafted adventure with one of the best lead performances of the year. And for those of us who grew up clicking our way through Fate of Atlantis, it does something even rarer — it makes the old magic feel new again.

It’s not perfect. The fists get repetitive and the open zones meander. But it is, start to finish, a delight — and sometimes that’s worth more than perfection.

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FAQ

Is Indiana Jones and the Great Circle first person or third person?

It is mostly first person during exploration, puzzles, and combat, with the camera pulling back to third person for climbing, set-pieces, and cinematic moments. The first-person view makes the whip and the world feel surprisingly immersive, and the storytelling quickly makes the perspective irrelevant.

Will fans of the old LucasArts point-and-click games like Fate of Atlantis enjoy it?

Yes, deeply. The Great Circle carries the same spirit of clever, story-driven puzzle solving, globe-trotting locations, and pulpy humor that made Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis a classic. It genuinely feels like a love letter to those adventures.

When is the game set in the Indiana Jones timeline?

It takes place in 1937, between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. It slots neatly into the classic film era, with Indy at the height of his pulp-hero powers.

How long does the Great Circle take to finish?

The main story runs roughly 15 to 20 hours. Mopping up the optional side mysteries, fieldwork, and collectibles can push a thorough playthrough past 30 hours.

Is it suitable to play around older kids?

Largely, yes. It is rated T for Teen with adventure-movie violence rather than blood and gore, so it plays much like watching the films together. It is a far easier living-room watch than most games in this hub.