INDIANA JONES AND THE GREAT CIRCLE

A whip-cracking look at the newly revealed first-person adventure

- Ian Evenden

Dial of Destiny might have proved that the cinematic franchise is as dead as Archimedes, but video games could be the new natural home of Indiana Jones. With no need for CGI de-aging or time travel, Great Circle can concentrate on what makes the series great: punching Nazis.

There’s likely to be plenty of that, as the game is set in 1943, between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film in which Nazis were punched, and Last Crusade, a movie that also contained its fair share of fist/nose moments. That sort of thing has to be filed under ‘likely’ for now as we know relatively little about the game beyond the events of the single trailer available and the sparse information released by publisher Bethesda. Hot off the release of Starfield, Bethesda may not be everyone’s favorite software house right now, but the big news is the name of the developer.

It’s MachineGames, Zenimax stablemate of Bethesda and the maker of Wolfenstein: The New Order and its associated sequels. The studio is known for its ability to build games that are grounded in their setting and come with a feeling of weight and power—just what you want if you’re cracking a whip, snatching a hat from under a descending stone door, or rearranging the squashy bits of a Wehrmacht soldier’s face.

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