For a series that has always dabbled in the supernatural, it’s surprising how startling people find it when an Indiana Jones movie dips its toes into the otherworldly. On the big screen alone the franchise has dealt with the theological and the magical, the alien, and even time travel for each of its dramatic climaxes. But while its latest saga—the clunky to play but great to watch video game Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, out now—certainly dabbles in all that too for its own grand finale, its best experimentation with the fantastical comes a little earlier, and roots it directly in Indy himself.
The Great Circle‘s third act begins with Indy and his new ally, Italian journalist Gina Lombardi, traveling to Thailand and chasing Nazi archaeologist Emmerich Voss as he hunts down the remaining artifacts to complete the titular circle. In search of the temples of the former Kingdom of Sukhothai, Indy and Gina team up with Pailin, the leader of a local insurgent group, and her uncle Sunan to navigate the waters and jungles around Siam—but before they do, they ask that Indy take part in a test. Placing a jar in front of him claiming to manifest one’s greatest fear, Dr. Jones braces himself: it’s going to be snakes. He knows it, you the audience knows it, Great Circle knows it, because at several moments in the game up to this point, it has invoked one of the film franchise’s most famous lines to remind you just what gets Indy’s heebie-jeebies up more than any fascist or supernatural event ever could.
Indy puts his hand in the jar to find that Pailin and Sunan were playing with him, teasing the foreign outsider with the expected othered tropes of exotic culture. All that’s in there is offal to fortify soup stock for dinner—neither snakes nor monkey brains to be found.
But Great Circle wants you to think that this is the knowing climax of its riffs on Indiana Jones’ famous fear, so it can surprise you with a curveball shortly after. After “facing his fears,” it turns out the temple housing the final piece of the Great Circle that Indy and Gina venture into is guarded by none other than a snake. A really, really big snake. One that could easily, and indeed tries to several times, snap up Indy whole in a single bite. And the whole sequence built around it is arguably Great Circle‘s best.
Not only is it an incredibly fun twist on the kind of fantastical elements Indiana Jones as a franchise has played with—we’ve done lots of creepy crawlies before, but we haven’t done unnaturally giant monstrous animals, a sort of halfway step between Indiana Jones‘ reality and the likes of a flesh-melting Ark of the Covenant or heart-cutting blood sacrifice. Not only does it take what could’ve otherwise been a slightly-too-played out nodding to the movies and actually bring something additive to the homage, it’s also the one rare moment I found in my playthrough that Great Circle mechanically clicked for me, nailing the friction of playing a very ordinary human professor in extraordinary circumstances.
As I said in my review, I found Great Circle to be at its very best whenever I was very specifically not actively playing it, but swimming through the water-logged ruins of Sukhothai made for the rare exception. Suddenly, all the frustrations I had with the way Great Circle felt to control actually fitted narratively: you hear Indy’s labored breathing the more panicked he gets trying to escape the snake. You hear his muffled underwater screams the first few times it swims by him as you scramble swimming from hiding spot to hiding spot, instant death or temporary respite only heralded by the tense hiss-clicking of this monstrous snake the second you hit the water, growing louder and louder. And when it comes to actually fighting the snake, trapped as you are on a small piece of ruin surrounded by ancient spears, the game trades the messy brawling of its fisticuffs for game of tense patience—constantly circling in this small space, disorienting yourself in the tension, waiting for the snake to raise out of the water and line up a strike, so you can twirl around and hurl a spear at its mouth.
There was a strange sense of simplicity to it all: I’ve played boss fights in video games before, I know you have to do something 3-4 times and then it’s done, and I knew there were only so many spears in arm’s reach. I couldn’t tell if it was always going to be the case that—no matter how much I circled watching the water—the snake would rise up to attack just outside of my peripheral vision, but it sure as hell did those 3-4 times it took to send it slithering away. and so I just kept slowly circling, ready to scramble for the next spear I needed to hurl. Indy kept breathing haggardly, as we both waited for the telltale sound of the snake’s head emerging from water. I wasn’t fighting the controls for a moment, I was fighting Indy’s fear in the moment, his absolutely worst nightmare coming to life, and helping him power through it at every toss.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is far from the first game to, perhaps in spite of itself, effectively make you feel fear through the friction of its controls. But in bridging so many elements of what makes Indiana Jones as a series work into a single moment on top of that—building beyond homage and bridging the series’ supernatural surreality with the very real fears of its human protagonist—made for a bright moment in an experience that otherwise left me largely frustrated.
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