Guess what, folks?
I just rage-quit another game.
You already know from the title of this essay that it was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
If you’ve read my other reviews (such as they are), you know that when I typically rage-quit a game like Arkham Knight or Gollum, it’s at the end of ever-more-unpleasant experience that finally broke down for me.
That’s not true of Great Circle. I had been generally enjoying myself. I was already composing this essay in my head.
Then… mild slam.
Then BIG SLAM!
Then rage-quit.
Let’s take a look at my impression of the game before the double slam. After all, what was a slam for me might be a walk-in-the-park for you. Perhaps you’ll enjoy Great Circle in a way I could not.
However, such is my weird approach to raging that I’m not going to include any spoiler alerts. If the game is spoiled for you, so be it. That’s the price MachineGames has to pay for their sins.
Where are the pretty pictures?
If you look over my other recent “mini-reviews”, you’ll see that I pepper them with screenshots from the games. I usually do a “call-and-response” with them, in which I caption the photos in reply to some text that appears on the screen.
I’m not doing that here, not because of the rage-quit, but because of the End-User License Agreement (“EULA”) legal contract that the game throws at you when you first start the game:
I didn’t include everything in the screenshot, but (as part of the agreement) the posting of screenshots is expressly forbidden.
So you won’t get to see Voss’ witty remarks about the insecure male ego.
I wonder how professional reviewers handle something like this? The contract seems to deny the concept of “fair use”, even for reviews.
Besides, as you can see in the screenshot, ZeniMax reserves all “moral rights” to their property. Goddess forbid that I trend on anyone’s morals!
The story
I have to give credit where credit is due: The story is better than at least three of the Indiana Jones films. If the cutscenes were edited into a cohesive whole, the result might be worthy of a movie release.
The game is set in the mid-1930s, amidst the rise of the Axis powers. Indiana Jones travels the world, looking for clues that will lead him to the secret of (what the heck, I’ll give you this spoiler alert!!!!) the Great Circle, a mystical artifact of mysterious power. His chief antagonist is a Nazi, Voss, who wants the power for the Third Reich.
Admittedly, this is not an original idea in the context of the Indiana Jones movies. That’s a virtue, not a flaw. No one goes to an Indiana Jones movie to see deep character development. They’re looking to watch Indy’s action sequences and puzzle solving.
Because of the rage-quit, within the game I never learned what the final power of the Great Circle was. I later read the game’s plot summary on Wikipedia. I have to admit, I would not have anticipated the ultimate surprise revelation of the game. (I also never would have gotten past the final Boss fight, but that’s a different rage-quit.)
So I’ll give Great Circle three whip-cracks for its story. MachineGames has an excellent understanding of what makes a good Indiana Jones tale.
A pity I’ll never purchase another game from them again. But that’s for later.
The game
Great Circle is fundamentally a stealth game. I like stealth games. I get to sneak around, look at the environment, time the movements of the characters.
For one of the sequences, the Gold Heist, I spent an hour in stealth mode, chipping away at the Nazi antagonists, searching for weapons to use to knock them out. Items in the game have a durability counter, so you can’t waylay opponents more than a couple of times before the item breaks and you have to find another. Fortunately, the game is littered with items ranging from bottles to sledgehammers.
I didn’t regard it as time wasted. I enjoyed it. I could take things at my own pace, be careful in my searches, deal with puzzles on my own time.
There are guns, however it’s not generally a good idea to use them. Using guns escalates the battle. If you punch out a Nazi in front of other Nazis, the other Nazis will rush forward to punch you. But one gunshot, and they’ll all pull out their guns. Even if you’re good at running, you might not escape the hail of gunfire.
If you can help it, most of the combat in the game is hand-to-hand: you punch the Fascists, they punch at you. Punching Fascists and Nazis is always fun. (It’s also fun in the game.)
Of course, even on its easiest difficulty, real-time challenges of this sort are difficult for me. I managed with some of the basic combat tactics, but never mastered maneuvers like grabbing vs. shoving vs. grappling. I could usually fend off two opponents at once, but for more than that, I simply ran.
I lost a fair share of battles, but the game’s “restore from death” mechanic was generally not too arduous. (I got really nervous into that hour-long stealth sequence, because it would have taken a really long time to recover if I got into trouble.)
From the Wikipedia article and a couple of web walkthroughs, I think the Big Boss battle at the end of the game would have been too much for me. It requires a lot of timed dodging, which I’m not good at. As I said before, perhaps I would have written this same essay a few days from now.
We’ll never know.
I’ll add what I think is a subtle flaw in the design: The gameplay and cutscenes don’t “fit” well. You’re in the middle of playing a game that requires a lot of interactivity, then you experience an action-packed cutscene in which you have no agency at all. You just watch Indiana punch a Nazi or fly a plane or whatever.
I wouldn’t be critical of this, except that the Uncharted series solved the “cinematic moments versus player agency” issue about two decades ago.
The puzzles
It wouldn’t be an Indiana Jones game without puzzles.
As we all know from our history books, ancient peoples like to set up elaborate puzzles and challenges to protect their sacred artifacts (which, in turn, turn out to be nothing more than breadcrumbs on the trail of a larger quest).
I got through most of the puzzles in the game without resorting to the web.
There was one puzzle, the “Flame Skeletons”, on which I spent a considerable amount of time to solve. I finally gave up and looked up the solution. When I saw it, I knew there was no possible way I could have solved it, as it involved two otherwise unconnected elements in the game. The reward for solving was paltry, and not worth the time investment. Once I knew the solution, I simply gave up on it.
There’s a difference between a puzzle that requires a lot of thought, versus a puzzle that’s annoying because it requires a lot of traveling back-and-forth. The puzzles in Obduction were like that. Most of those in the Great Circle were like the former, but too many were like the latter.
Some of the puzzles were annoying for their unsolvability because it wasn’t clear that they couldn’t be solved until you completed later sections of the game. I only learned this from reading the web. This has become a standard feature of games of this sort (the Tomb Raider games do this, for example) but I don’t particularly like it.
Graphics
The environmental design was excellent. While there was some re-use of graphics objects throughout the game (how many different designs can one come up with for a locked box?) for the most part the visual impact of each zone was distinct and interesting: the Vatican, the Egyptian desert, the jungles of Siam.
The human figures were not as well-done. The motion capture/animation was rather stiff. Ten years ago I would have been impressed at the quality. Now, after BG3 and Expedition 33, I’ve come to expect better.
But no game has to match my “expectations”!
An annoying aspect of the visual gameplay, at least for me, is that it’s a first-person game. Although you see Indy’s full figure in cutscenes, ladder-climbing, whip-jumps, etc., for the most part you just see his arms floating in front of you.
I know that a great many gamers prefer a first-person game. I like to see my character’s avatar. It helps with positioning, which was important for many of the puzzles.
An example of this was the “Sandtrap Puzzle”. I replayed that sequence a dozen times before I finally looked it up on the web. The solution was simple, but not obvious due to the limits of first-person perspective.
Oh, well. I recognize first-person versus third-person is a design choice. I wish more games offered a choice of perspective.
Again, that’s probably just me.
The rage-quit
Up to the point in the game that I rage-quit, the game was reasonably enjoyable. I wouldn’t have placed it in my article on my highest-rated games, but it was a decent break in my obsession about Baldur’s Gate 3.
Then I came to the annoying “Gear Puzzle”. I tried to solve it. The puzzle is in two parts. I solved each part individually, but I couldn’t solve them both at once.
I spent an hour or so on it, searching for missing cogs. Finally, after looking through more than one web walkthrough, I found the answer: You didn’t have to solve both gear problems at once. There was a visual clue to this, but you had to observe it at just the right time. If you missed it, too bad.
I was annoyed by this. The web walkthroughs didn’t make it clear either. It wasn’t that I couldn’t solve the puzzle, it’s that I missed the movement of one statue that did not repeat.
So I was in a poor mood.
Then I came to the sequence immediately after: the Snake Challenge.
Up until that point in the game, there’d been no sign of my nemesis, the timed platformer challenge. I hate them. If you look at my list of five lowest-rated games, three of them are on the list due to such challenges.
While the Snake Challenge is not explicitly a “plotforming” challenge, the concept is still there: Indy is swimming underwater wearing a breath mask with a limited air supply. If he spends too much time beneath the surface, he dies. He’s navigating through a series of tunnels, with a giant snake chasing him. If the snake catches up to him, he dies.
I tried.
I failed.
Rinse and repeat.
I looked it up on the web. It involved maneuvers that I would never have figured out on my own.
I tried again.
I failed again.
Rinse and repeat again.
I simply could not react fast enough, move fast enough, interpret the visual clues fast enough to avoid the Snake.
Yes, this was on easiest difficulty.
A game that had so far avoided the trope of timed platform challenges had thrown one in.
You’ve guessed it: rage-quit.
Aftermath
After I rage-quit Arkham Knight and Gollum, I watched the remainder of those games on YouTube.
Somehow, I didn’t feel like doing that for Great Circle. The story was fun, but it wasn’t so compelling that I wanted to sit through an hours-long YouTube video of someone else dodging the snake and solving puzzles and whatever.
I read a plot summary on Wikipedia and that was enough.
Do I feel I wasted my time and money playing the game?
To be fair, the game was mostly fun up until the timed platformer challenge. I see it as a bad design decision, one that was “fatal” for me, but not necessarily for everyone.
I spent $76 on the game, and played it for 26 hours. At roughly $3/hour, that’s less than the cost of seeing an Indiana Jones movie in a theater.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was a reasonable value.
I just wish it didn’t have to end on a rage-quit.