Indiana Jones is a man with hands. Deny this at your own peril. ‘Write what you know’ they say. Indiana Jones And The Great Circle’s writers knew about having hands. They’d picked up a thing or two. Turned the odd key. Raised the occasional entire lemon to their lips and devoured it whole. Clicked a camera button. Placed an object upon a table. They had touched things, and beyond this, they had felt them. They knew that the player could never truly be Indiana Jones, but they could be allowed to make a pretend man who sounded at least 83% like Indiana Jones do things with his hands that very much resemble the sort of things Indiana Jones might do.
Twisting code locks. Yoinking bundles of fascist cash. Reappropriating ancient artefacts. Gripping a lever, then moving it; two distinct phases, lest the prosaic tyranny of canned animations betray the complex reality of having hands in the first place. Punch a fascist. Punch a fascist from behind. Hit a fascist with a metal dustpan. Hit a fascist with a sledgehammer. Hit a fascist with, perhaps, his own favourite violin, perfectly timing the shattering of the luxury wood with the fascist’s last few seconds of consciousness as to impart the inescapable truth that not only is he being knocked out, but his favourite violin is absolutely fucked beyond repair.
The Great Circle’s simulated tactility flitters between glorious and laborious. Many deceptively simple actions are one or sometimes two steps longer than you might expect. Keys are inserted, then turned. Levers gripped, then pulled. Staves raised above pressure plates, then lowered. Hands are placed, and then used. Whips are hooked around ledges marked with white scratches – the gentleman’s yellow paint – then scaled aggressively slowly, each gripped invisible rung on the makeshift leather ladder drawing out a grunt of exertion from Indy, underlying his most endearing and important trait: he is a human accidentally capable of superhuman feats. It is a powerfully good bit of characterisation that I dislike repeating so much I would swap it out for Corvo’s blink in an instant, immersion be damned.
Still, for how plodding Indy’s climbing is, it’s the simplest action in Great Circle that feels the least satisfying. You can throw melee objects. You can flip over a pistol, smash it over a skull, then repair it. But a trigger is just a trigger. Pull it, and something dies. Instant, thoughtless, and anti-climatic. Using it feels less like a combat action, more like a ‘skip combat’ button. A shrug at the idea of engaging with all your other options. A lethargic refusal to throw hands. It’s a great twist Brendy touched on here.
It took Machine Games an oddly long time to show a substantially gnawable chunk of gameplay in Indy’s marketing campaign, instead attempting to Troy-ly Bakedazzle the audience with cutscenes and snippets. I still do not like this approach, but I do understand it a little better now. In perhaps the single most fitting advertisement for Game Pass yet, The Great Circle is a game that is very much about touching and feeling things, and so asks to be touched and felt to be understood much more so than your average absurdly expensive luxury game. There’s much less “don’t you worry about that, let us take care of it for you”, and so Indy’s hands are your hands. My hands. I’ll return them when he returns all those artefacts.