Indiana Jones And The Great Circle is both a more "relaxed" Wolfenstein and Riddick plus Nazis

MachineGames have made a decent living as the creators of satirical alternate histories in which you messily murder Nazis using mighty double-handfuls of shotgun. There are Nazis to fight in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle - a globe-trotting, tomb-robbing adventure featuring a Lost Ark-era Harrison Ford - but as you'd expect from a Lucasfilm adaptation, there's rather less of the bloodshed.

Wolfenstein's antic skullbursting has given way to the clean, Spielbergian "PAF" of Indy's fist connecting with a fascist jawbone. He's got a pistol, true, but you'll rely just as much and more on his whip, which is used both to trip adversaries over and as a means of swinging on things or yanking distant props. And let's not forget his fancy fedora: there's a skill that lets you revive from KO if you can crawl over and reclaim your dropped hat before you lose consciousness. It's the grace note for a "light-hearted matinee adventure", in the words of game director Jerk Gustafsson, which takes ideas from his and the company's older first-person games and steams away their guts and grime, while adding a few sunny flourishes of its own.

"When designing this game I think we've even been going back into a history of our own," Gustafsson told assembled journalists during a pre-Gamescom hands-off presentation. "First-person is the primary perspective that you play in, but we do combine this with third-person [for actions such as swinging from your whip], so very similar to what we did back in the day with the Riddick games and the Darkness game. And also similar to those games, which were the first games we did where we put a lot of focus on character building and story combined with a lot of variation in gameplay. And that's something that we've pushed very hard here. We want the player to really feel that they can take on different obstacles or challenges in many different ways."

The story - overseen by Bethesda's Todd Howard, which may have you groaning or grinning depending on your Starfield experience - sees Dr Jones embarked on a quest to sundry pop-historical sites that together form the titular Great Circle, aided by galivanting journalist Gina and opposed by breathy Third Reich treasure-hunter, Emmerich Voss. The game's environments, which range from the Pyramids of Gizeh to European cities at night, seem comparable to MachineGames's Wolfenstein projects in being compactly built and mostly linear, yet often full of different routes and side activities to discover. There don't seem to be many wide-open spaces, but there are plenty of alleyways and tunnels.

Larger setups give you the option of being sneaky or violent, boffing guards in a particular order and hiding the bodies, or making use of the fittings. You can lob spears to create surfaces to swing from, for example. You also have the option of donning a disguise - there are story episodes that require it, and you'll build up a wardrobe of outfits you can change to suit the situation. One particular scenario might have you playing the servant and bringing wine to a rancorous fascist. I don't get the impression this is an Agent 47-grade exercise in social camouflage, though the idea of a Hitman level set in one of Indy's tombs with a cast of stymied stormtroopers has a certain appeal.

Speaking of tombs, they're predictably full of traps - spike pits, puddles of scorpions, and a chamber that floods with sand when you meddle with the plinth at its centre. All the old Indy standbys. They also house lots of bespoke puzzles - there isn't really a defining puzzle minigame such as glyph-matching, with conundrums varying by the setting. In what I hope is music to Graham's ears, some of the puzzles take inspiration from the old point-and-click Indiana Jones games. Possibly the most interesting aspect of Indiana's tomb-raiding, however, is photography: as you explore you'll fill a journal with snapshots that clue you in about backstory and the way forward, alongside drawings of puzzle props and scribbles of plot speculation. The journal itself is a lovely creation, all doodles and dogears: aside from using your fedora to revive, it's the aspect of The Great Circle I find most enchanting.

Less enchanting, but quite enticing: the combat system, in which you'll alternate between jabs, parries and haymakers. Gustafsson again cites Escape from Butcher Bay as an influence: "going back to Riddick, something we have been working with for a long time which can be a challenge in first-person is these very intensive hand-to-hand fistfights, and that of course combines also with the whip, which adds another element to the combat in the game." I'm not sure whether there's a progression system tethered to the felling of Nazis, but you'll definitely earn Adventure Points for unlocks by finding books. The idea is both to gratify your thirst for new abilities or passive buffs and encourage you to poke around. Should you miss anything, you'll be able to revisit cleared areas by means of the game's world map.

The Great Circle is "the biggest game MachineGames have ever made", according to Gustafsson. I'm trying to work out whether it's their most ambitious. By virtue of being a licensed adaptation, The Great Circle dilutes things I liked about the developers' past works: it's odd to see MachineGames portraying Nazis this, er, gently, and I miss the angstier writing and identity dynamics of the company's Wolfenstein offerings. It makes me wonder what MachineGames might do with the character of a sleazy grave-robbing archeologist if they weren't constrained by Lucasfilm, with whom they've worked "closely" to get access to film archive materials.

Still, The Great Circle looks like an entertaining romp, all PAFs and puzzling, and I do find it intriguing for being a MachineGames production that isn't held together by weapons the size of cows. "It has been a pretty big step for the team as well, to move away from this intense, BJ Blaskowitz gun-based game into something that is much more approachable in many ways, much more casual and relaxed in a way, focused more on puzzle-solving and exploration," Gustafsson says in closing. "It has been a rather big deviation from what we're used to doing here as well, but still the core remains the same: we're aiming for this experience where you actually feel like you're part of the world, where you can step into the shoes of the protagonist and feel that you are part of this big adventure."

Indiana Jones And The Great Circle will launch before the end of 2024. Find out more on Steam.

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