Professor Indiana Jones in 2024 is taking lessons from Vin Diesel in 2000. Xbox’s marquee game this year is “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle,” developed by MachineGames. Billed as a first-person adventure, players will be a young Indiana Jones (voiced by Troy Baker of “The Last of Us” fame) preventing Nazis from obtaining treasure.
It aims to replicate an Indy adventure that’s less about first-person shooting and more about solving puzzles, laying on the charm and punching Nazis – in sharp contrast to Xbox’s bloodier blockbuster this fall, “Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.” This is all thanks to the rich résumé of the developer: MachineGames was created in 2009 by former employees of Sweden-based Starbreeze Studios, which in 2004 created the Vin Diesel game “The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay.” Against all odds, this spinoff title from the cult 2000 sci-fi movie “Pitch Black” ended up becoming one of the finest first-person games ever made.
MachineGames has since been making games that evolve the immersive adventure formula established in “Riddick,” a game that let players negotiate and socialize with the prison society in making their escape. Now 20 years later, echoes of “Riddick” live on in the latest MachineGames title, made in partnership with Disney and Lucasfilm for release in December. Game director and studio co-founder Jerk Gustafsson confirmed that Indy has Riddick’s DNA.
“‘Riddick’ was the first game where we really started to create this formula with strong character-driven storytelling mixed with a lot of variation in gameplay,” Gustafsson said in a press interview before the Gamescom showcase in Germany this week. “Everything from ‘Riddick’ forward has been very focused on very mature, violent stories and high-intensity action. (This gameplay style) is still very much what we want to do.
It just shifts tone drastically toward something more matinée.” Indeed, Indy feels like a G-rated version of MachineGames’ most popular work: their interpretations of the Wolfenstein series, the franchise that practically invented first-person shooting games. In “Wolfenstein,” the player is a Jewish American one-man army violently murdering thousands of Nazis and fighting a cybernetic Hitler.
“Great Circle” modifies this formula by letting players become a one-Jones army punching thousands of Nazis. The studio promises that “Great Circle” is its biggest game world ever, and a 30-minute hands-off demonstration showcased this across various scenarios, such as going undercover using disguises, finding tucked-away rooms that hold keys and information to other secret areas, and slow-burn puzzle scenarios reminiscent of the classic film trilogy. Those films were the key inspiration, said creative director Axel Torvenius.
“The sections of the games that are more open do allow for a lot of exploration. We have lots of content to explore that is not only tied to the story path,” he said. He didn’t want to specify how long the game is because it’s variable.
People focused on the main story would have a much shorter experience than explorers. Gustafsson said one of the team’s earliest exercises in planning the game was to make a pie chart of various elements the game would have, and then focus on features the studio has less experience in. “The shooting, we know we got that down, so we focused on the things we know will be difficult to develop first and move back to something we know and have done before,” Gustafsson said, adding that those features focused on the “adventure” aspects of the game, like updating Indy’s journal with details and designing temple puzzles.
I’m less excited about the story because so far, much of it is rehashing classic Indiana Jones tropes, which at this point are pervasive in pop culture. In ’80s fashion, Indy even has a woman sidekick that just so happens to be a journalist doing typical adventure-girl high jinks that real journalists would never actually do. PlayStation’s Uncharted series retooled the archetypes to great success.
But MachineGames truly has made some of the most satisfying action games of the past decade. Even though I haven’t touched the controls, just watching the game felt satisfying every time Indy whipped a Nazi, reeled him in and snapped him in place for a combination of punches. Shooting your way out of hairy situations doesn’t seem feasible, and Torvenius said many of the game’s levels can be completed without firing a single bullet.
The stealth genre has become more niche, so it’s nice to see these elements emphasized in such a high-budget title. The jury’s out on whether Indiana Jones is still a bankable intellectual property these days, especially with recent failed attempts at reviving the film franchise. But MachineGames and the people there have built up more than two decades of trust and good faith that they can turn anything into a compelling first-person adventure.
The game will release Dec. 9 this year for Xbox and PC, and releases on the PlayStation 5 sometime in the spring..
