Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (2024)

PSA for people playing this. When you reach the Himalayas, turn RT indirect illumination on. If you don’t , when you enter the mountain ship you’ll experience a whiteout effect, and will barely be able to see anything. On most areas of the game indirect illumination tends to make shadowed areas too dark, without definition, so I had it off. But when you get to this area, it seems for there to be contrast between the ship and the ice the game requires indirect illumination.

This is bad with anyone with a 8GB GPU because you’re probably already close to maxing the VRAM without indirect illumination on, so watch out for other bugs as a result of memory overflow.

I wonder what this are looks like on console where most objects are excluded from the illumination map to save on VRAM.

Games that aren’t smart enough to cancel hint dialogue if you’ve already solved a puzzle before prompting the puzzle hint drive me nuts. I forged a key and put into into place. Indy made a comment about that action. Then made another comment triggered by finding the door that needed the key, and my companion said “I think we need to forge keys for this door.” Yeah, no kidding, we just did that and already heard the post forging dialogue.

Games need to employ logic that accounts for doing things out of the expected order. Yes, 90% of gamers with go through steps A to B to C. But some of us do A to C, and we don’t need B to pop up after we completed C. I encounter this in a lot of AAA titles, where experienced players will often complete things faster than dialogue prompts can fire, and all the dialogue will play out after you’ve already completed the actions, breaking the verisimilitude of the game. Devs need to get better at accounting for the people that are going to see, understand and complete a puzzle in seconds, rather than minutes.

Downloaded the game on Game Pass and overcame the first hurdle: How to play the game in English without having to turn my whole PC into English. I don't know why Microsoft is still unable to make this an easy choice in all games. There is also no option that would allow me to use English voice over but German UI/German subtitles except I copy files around and restart my PC... like as if it were still 1936 1990. For now all Apps will start in English because I had to make it the default for all apps, because apparently I can't make it the default only for the game.

The game runs flawlessly so far and looks great. I played the first little part and the second one and now I am off to Rome but too tired to keep going. Also missing the little map with the plane on it and the music- I don't know why, but I loved that in the movies it made it clearer how far Indy was travelling. As far as I can remember the point & click games had it - just nostalgia talking here.

So far it keeps very true to the first movie without any of the stuff that hasn't aged so well out of the 80s. Optimistic that this will be a game I can play to the end. Also totally fine with the voice of Indy - not watching many movies and series pays out I do not even know who the guy is who voices him. He sounds very Indy for me, but English is not my first language, so I guess that helps too.

I had to fiddle with the FOV slider to not get motion sick, but it seems to work for me now.

Did someone else take the pan from the camp site and wondered what to do with it? I hope at some point in the game I can hit someone with a pan! :D

Ok, since I already kind of brought this up elsewhere:

Boy oh boy the AI is kind of dumb in this game. It is astounding how often these fascists stand facing a wall or in a corner, their backs to the open area where I am sneaking around. Sometimes there are several of them in one room, each facing a different wall or corner and none of them hear me when a crack a shovel across the head of one of their comrades.

But that's really ok, it accurately portrays the intelligence level of your average fascist.

Gave this a shot since it's on Game Pass.

Great game it seems, and looks like it will be fun, but I wish they would have allowed a third person point of view. I get it, Bethesda has a formula (FP point of view), but with more adventure oriented games like this one, there are times when I want the third person point of view. It's less headache inducing for me.

I've got a lot of other games to play and I'm not getting rid of Game Pass soon, so I'll play this later, but so far looks good.