Indiana Jones and the Great Circle devs say an Indy game 'could never be a shooter, should never be a shooter,' so they're embracing his signature whip, improvised brawls, and disguise-based stealth instead

In a conversation with PCG global editor-in-chief Phil Savage at Gamescom, MachineGames developers went into more detail about how Indiana Jones and the Great Circle builds on their prior games like the new Wolfensteins and Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. Their emphasis on rollicking, scrappy improvisation has me way more excited than I was before for this adventure.

"Indiana Jones, he's not a gunslinger, right? He doesn't go guns blazing into situations," said Jens Andersson, design director at MachineGames. "So it could never be a shooter, should never be a shooter. But hand to hand combat, that makes total sense."

That's where the Riddick connection comes in: along with MachineGames' founders, Andersson (who joined on in 2022) worked on the shockingly excellent side adventure for Vin Diesel's buff sci-fi Hannibal Lecter, which has some of the best first person melee combat to grace a game. That's a strong pedigree, but also not where the story ends, either: Indiana Jones has a very different vibe from Riddick's brand of brutal prison knife fights and cold-blooded stalking.

"He's not a fighter, that's not his nature, even though he ends up in fights all the time," Andersson explained. "He's an unlikely hero, lucky⁠—how can we replicate that into gameplay, make the player feel that humor, how do we get that across?

"Compared to even Riddick, that has a different style of hand to hand combat. [The Great Circle] is much more semi-chaotic, lots of things around the environment that you can pick up⁠—pots and pans that you pick up and smash into people's heads…"

"And banjos!" Piped in Axel Torvenius, MachineGames creative director.

"...And banjos," Andersson confirmed. "I love the banjo."

That had me sitting up in my chair: Improvisational brawling like that has got to be a nightmare to program and consistently implement, but has led to some of my favorite videogame combat: Dark Messiah of Might and Magic's freeform fights and Baldur's Gate 3's turn-based slapstick come to mind. In addition to improvised weapons, Indy's whip will also be a huge part of the game in both combat and traversal, with a dedicated button reserved for it.

Outside combat, it sounds like the Great Circle will be expanding on the Wolfenstein reboot games' light stealthing, bringing things dangerously close to my beloved immersive sims' territory. Andersson described the game expanding and contracting between more open and linear areas, a clear delineation that sounds similar to The New Order and Colossus: "There are also more open areas, almost bordering immersive sim-style, like there's an enemy camp, here you're supposed to get into the main building, figure it out, and you can explore."

While pure crouchy stealth infiltration will be an option, the Great Circle will also have an exciting social stealth option, which sounds like a more systemic expansion on Wolfenstein's nail-biting, Tarantino-esque sequences like the beginning of The Old Blood. "Every big location has a number of disguises for you to discover," said Andersson. "That helps you pass as someone that belongs there, gives you access to areas you otherwise would have a really hard time getting through."

I was always slightly bummed that we'd be getting this Indiana Jones game instead of a proper Wolfenstein 3, but the Great Circle is sounding like everything I would have wanted out of that game, with an Indiana Jones twist. For my money, that's moved the Great Circle firmly into "must-play" territory when it releases December 8.