When speaking to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle design director Jens Andersson last year, I wondered aloud whether his game might be an immersive sim. He bristled slightly at the suggestion, and I completely understand why. The term coined by Looking Glass, creators of System Shock and Thief, speaks of player-led possibilities – the freedom to approach dangerous scenarios your own way, and to define your own moral compass. But it’s also limiting.
Invoking the imsim is a little like the ringing of a bell, conjuring all sorts of very specific yet arbitrary expectations, from hacking and turrets to an unbroken first-person perspective – the latter of which Indiana Jones doesn’t have. “It’s like using the word Metroidvania,” Andersson said. “It means different things to different people.”
So it would be counterproductive to sell a game as varied as the Great Circle, with its high-wire setpieces, photographic exploration and pondersome side puzzles, as a successor to Thief or Deus Ex. But after more than 20 hours in its company, I’m now perfectly comfortably slapping the game with the imsim label that makes marketing managers so nervous, and pronouncing it a fantastic example of the form. A much-needed one, if the beloved genre is to break out of the rather rarified niche it has found itself in of late.
One problem immersive sims have had is that – as Thief designer Randy Smith once told me about his games – they’re not comfort food. They demand close attention, asking you to plot routes through dense levels, master finicky stealth systems and, once you’ve encountered an enemy, decide whether or not you want to break cover at all. While in theory they support all kinds of play, in practice, games like Deus Ex and Dishonored dissuade bloodshed by employing friendly NPCs to tell you off. They invite you to question yourself, which is not always a comfortable spot to be in.
It’s easy to wind up in a cycle of quicksaves and quickloads as you steer toward the ‘right’ path through the game, rather than roll with the punches and allow for the magic of unexpected outcomes – the botched takedown that leads to a retreating swordfight and the discovery of a hidden shrine in a condemned house, for instance.
Developers are already wise to this tendency and have devised solutions. Dishonored studio Arkane Lyon made Deathloop, the timeloop concept of which unchains you from the consequences of killing, and encourages you to experiment freely with its levels, knowing they’ll be reset the next day. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle takes a different tack that I reckon is more to everyone’s tastes: it’s simply looser, and more forgiving.
Its first trick is to lift a precept from the Hitman trilogy, which is to make the majority of spaces non-hostile by default. Step into the Vatican, or the Toblerone-landscaped dig sites of Gizeh, and you’ll find a suite of disguises that let Indy walk freely among the nuns of the Sistine Chapel or the Nazis at the checkpoints. You can get to know the winding, alluring geography of these places at your own pace, scoping out the entrance and exit points of any guarded camps, or the off-limits floors of the Apostolic Palace, without having to stick your head above the parapet.
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It’s in these exploratory expeditions that you come to appreciate the bounds forward MachineGames has made in nonlinear level design. Before the Great Circle, the studio collaborated with Arkane Lyon on Wolfenstein: Youngblood. One of its designers, Julien Eveillé, told me that MachineGames made the most of the project – setting out to learn from Arkane’s master level builders. That new expertise is fully on show in the Vatican, a positively warrenlike world of climbable scaffolding, open windows, ziplines and crawlspaces. Yet it fights overwhelm with clear breadcrumb objectives – many of which are optional but fold back into the main story – and a gradually growing set of costumes and keys that expands your options over time.
That’s not the only fashion in which the Golden Circle is unlike the best-known games in MachineGames’ oeuvre. Wolfenstein: The New Order established a brutal, binary stealth paradigm that made escalation to wailing sirens and mapwide combat almost inevitable. But Indiana Jones plumps for a much more localised kind of encounter resolution. It’s telling that when you pull Indy’s revolver from its holster, you get a button prompt to flip it over and use it as a melee weapon. At every stage, the Great Circle pushes you towards fistfights rather than shootouts – which means it’s very feasible to biff your way through a roomful of alerted blackshirts without disturbing the guards outside the door. That’s if you even disturb anyone in the first place; these Nazis are uniformly shortsighted and dopey, and even the fruit you consume for stamina can be hurled as distraction should one wander your way.
There’s a part of me – and perhaps you as well – that scoffs at this kind of leniency, certainly on paper. Immersive sims are challenges of skill, and besting your opponents through combat or circumvention ought to feel like an achievement, not an accident. But the appeal of the Great Circle as a systemic playground is never undermined, and I think there are a few reasons for that. One is that said fistfights are no cakewalk; I’ve been dragged out of the Vatican’s underground boxing ring on my back, accompanied by the jeering of off-duty soldiers, more times than I care to admit. Another is that you’re never completely without tension – subject to possible discovery from the piercing gaze of an officer even when in disguise. And the third reason is, well, Indiana Jones.
George Lucas’s hero is the magnetic core at the centre of the Great Circle, and the character that makes sense of its contrivances. Here is a man whose stubbornness makes him both silly and resilient; whose slick recoveries always ride on the back of a daft mistake or loss of control.
His personality is not the stuff of quickloads, but of muddling through and making it out once the boulder starts rolling. When it’s Indy’s silhouette you see beneath you in the Egyptian sun, it feels entirely appropriate to blunder into a Nazi and then lose them by crashing through a few tents and hiding behind a market stall. Perhaps your crouched position brings you to eye level with a pouch of stolen gold, or a letter that opens up a whole new avenue of archeological investigation. Indy is a creature of luck, and that luck tends to find him when he’s being swept downriver.
The Great Circle makes it easier than ever to embrace the improvisation that fans of Dishonored and Dark Messiah have always loved – to bungle a stealth takedown and so find yourself hurling a spade into a man’s face, then shoving his fellow into a table, before desperately clambering onto a roof to dance between the rocks thrown by a growing crowd of Nazis. More often than not, you’ll react your way both into and out of trouble, and wind up with a new anecdote on the other side. A procedurally generated scene that Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford might have come up with on the fly – just like the unexpected punchline that cuts short the sword fight in Raiders of the Lost Ark, conceived for the sake of a cast and crew overrun by dysentery.
The first time you trip over yourself in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, you might reach for the most recent checkpoint. But not for long. Soon enough you’ll be joyously barrelling through the consequences of your inelegant actions, just to see whether you can land on your feet. After all, there’s only one rule in Indiana Jones: the hat might get knocked off, trampled or heated to the point of almost bursting into flame. But so long as it can be dusted off and ends up back on our hero’s head, the day is won.