Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is a game that stands out for a number of reasons, not least because it shone as one of 2024’s only true exclusive releases for the Xbox Series consoles. It’s also a spin-off to a beloved film franchise that, instead of being a tie in, treads its own path and narrative through this character’s ongoing adventures.
It’s an undeniable success, with Troy Baker’s turn as Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones proving to be nothing short of remarkable. The story is classic Indy, with a mysterious set of events putting Dr Jones in the direct path of Adolf Hitler’s obsession with the occult, while menacing German archaeologist, Herr Voss chews up the scenery in vicious style.
It’s a game that could easily drag you in from beginning to end, consuming all of your gaming time for a week, but for whatever reason – eating more than my body weight in mince pies at repeated family gatherings being one of them – I’ve not been able to play huge swathes of the game, instead diving in episodically to beat a puzzle, take a few pictures of historic buildings, or indulge in the excellent cutscenes. I’ve been loving it, and if anything this is how Indiana Jones and The Great Circle makes the most sense, with the game mimicking the beats of the very movie serials that inspired Geroge Lucas to create Indy in the first place.
Serials rose to prominence in the first half of the 20th Century, with movies broken down into weekly episodic releases, tempting audiences to return time and time again to the theatre. In a lot of ways, they paved the way for TV series and episodic content that have come to define the way we consume television.
They were often action-packed, with a binary vision of good and evil, making stars of the stalwart heroes and the helpless maidens that they rescued, and each episode came to a close with a cliffhanger designed to bring you back a week later, the hero dangling from a precipice or seemingly destined to die at the hands of a nefarious villain.
These beats exist within Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, and, playing it like a serial, they work incredibly well. An early pause comes beneath the Vatican, trapped in a chamber with two potentially deadly routes to navigate. Rather than continue straight through, this was where I left the game, mulling over the fantastical catacombs hidden beneath Rome, and dwelling on what the possible solutions might be.
By the time I returned, I was thoroughly invested in continuing Dr Jones’ adventure. Arguably, even more so than if I’d just hurtled through it as we’re so often keen to do, and particularly as a games writer who plays things to a deadline.
Even just the opening tutorial, a lavishly recreated rendition of the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, is a perfect serial episode, introducing us to our hero and, in the film, our antagonist. It’s packed full of action and drama, lasts fifteen minutes, and in the movie it ends with Jones’ dramatic escape via seaplane, setting us up for the further adventures we’re about to take part in.
Lucas’ obsession with serial movies stemmed from his childhood, where Saturday-morning matinees revisited the format that was already starting to dwindle in popularity thanks to the rise of television. Here, serials like Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and Zorro cemented his love for swashbuckling heroes, and of science fiction, which he famously had some small success with as well.
If anything, episodic content is the perfect delivery format. The first instances of it can be traced back to the serialised fiction that authors like Charles Dickens and F. Scott Fitzgerald made their name with, releasing a steady stream of serialised chapters in the newspapers of the day. Novellas like A Christmas Carol built their audience organically, gaining popularity, notoriety and success long before water coolers had been invented to talk about them over.
There are several reasons why this worked, and continues to work, in terms of distributing content to the masses, but in the case of Indiana Jones and The Great Circle it’s because it gives you time to think. It gives you time to mull over the things you’ve seen, the places you’ve visited, and roll them over in your mind, picking away at the layers of art and storytelling that MachineGames have crafted.
Games have adopted more episodic formats in a variety of ways, though it’s come at a price. Live service games are the most significant example running through the industry right now, their constant need for new activities, more battle passes, higher player engagement metrics leading to a massive churn of creative effort that all too often feels doomed to failure. A better parallel would be the episodic narrative adventures of Telltale Games, though they famously struggled to meet production deadlines, the gaps between episodes being too long and interest waning – thankfully their most recent effort, The Expanse, from the reborn studio had a faster cadence.
And on a more simplistic level, we often see games designed with a more bitesized narrative approach in mind. That’s especially true of games for handhelds like Nintendo Switch or even PC handhelds like Steam Deck, where games that let you pick up and play for 10-20 minutes at a time can mesh better with the free time windows we have for gaming.
While Indiana Jones and The Great Circle doesn’t explicitly stop and start, nor pushes you to do so, the beats of serialised fiction and cinema run through it. I urge you, perhaps for a second playthrough, or if you’re waiting for the game’s eventual release on PS5, consider playing it like the serials that inspired the character. Step away at the cliffhanger, leave Indy dangling from a zeppelin, because, just like the artefacts he cherishes, the passage of time changes things, adding value where there wasn’t any before.
