Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

• 1. Introduction

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  Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a 2024 action-adventure game from MachineGames, published by Bethesda Softworks. Its mystery begins with a line drawn on a map. Scattered around the world are strange sites that, once joined, form a perfect circle. In the game's setting of 1937, several groups are racing to harness a power tied to that circle. Archaeologist Indiana Jones means to stop them.

  The puzzle behind the screen is just as intriguing. Why did the idea wait so long to become a game? Why put the player behind the eyes of a hero whose face fans already know so well? And how do you convince people who love a set of films that a new adventure belongs beside them?

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• 2. Long Road to Production

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  Around 2009, Todd Howard pitched an Indiana Jones game to the franchise's creator, George Lucas. Howard was a game director at Bethesda Game Studios, known for role-playing series such as The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and he was a fan of the character. The pitch stalled for two reasons. Bethesda lacked the resources, and Lucasfilm wanted to publish the game itself, a job Bethesda also wanted. Unable to agree, Howard and his team moved on to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in 2011.

  Things changed after 2016, when Disney, the owner of Lucasfilm, stopped publishing its own games and began licensing its franchises to outside partners. Talks between Bethesda and Lucasfilm started again in 2019. A friend of Howard named John Drake had just been appointed Disney's VP of Business Development and Licensing for Games. The project that followed became Lucasfilm's first non-Star Wars game in years and the first Indiana Jones game since Indiana Jones Adventure World in 2011.

  Howard picked MachineGames to lead the work because of its modern Wolfenstein games, which also cast Nazis as the villains. He conceived the story and served as executive producer, treating the game as a passion project. Jerk Gustafsson directed. Jens Andersson joined as design director in late 2022, a role he had held on the earlier pitched version. Before that he had been lead designer on The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay in 2004 and The Darkness in 2007. More than 20 developers from The Darkness joined the Indiana Jones team, and development lasted more than five years.

  For a studio used to making run and gun games with heavy weaponry, a slower-paced hero took a lot of time to learn.

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• 3. The Hunt for the Stones

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  The story sits between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989. It opens at Marshall College, where Jones has just returned after leaving his fiancée, Marion Ravenwood. A giant named Locus breaks in, steals a cat mummy and knocks Jones unconscious. Locus wears a medallion with a symbol resembling that of the Vatican Secret Archive, so Jones infiltrates Vatican City to find answers.

  In Vatican City, Benito Mussolini and his Blackshirts hold power, and they are working with a Nazi German archaeologist and occultist named Emmerich Voss. Jones meets a reporter named Ginetta Lombardi, called Gina, who is investigating Voss because her sister Laura has disappeared. The two join forces. They learn that a tribe of giants called the Nephilim Order has secretly worked for the Roman Catholic Church to guard the Great Circle's secret. The cat mummy holds a special stone connected to it. Voss steals the Order's stones and flees, and Jones and Gina stow away on his zeppelin. Jones explains that the circle is made of sacred religious sites, and he fears Voss has found the key to its power.

  At a Nazi dig in Gizeh, Jones learns that the Order worked with Egyptians for thousands of years before the Church was founded. The pair find the Idol of Ra and take its stone, but Voss recovers it and leaves Jones for dead in the desert. Gina rescues him. In the Himalaya Mountains they discover that the third stone once carried a Nazi battleship all the way from South America. There they find Laura frozen to death, and a Nazi colonel named Viktor Gantz captures Jones. Gina sets off a grenade, which frees Jones and sends the battleship skidding down the mountain.

  Jones then uses the third stone to open a portal to Shanghai, in the middle of the Japanese invasion of the city. Gantz dies there. After hijacking a Japanese fighter plane, the pair fly to the nearest Great Circle ruin, in Sukhothai, Siam. Locus confronts them and warns that the secret must never come to light, but Jones ignores him. Voss attacks as Jones collects the stone, and Gina is captured in the escape.

  Locus sees that Jones cares more about Gina than about the stones, and he decides to help. At the Ziggurat of Ur, the last Great Circle site, Locus calls the Nephilim Order to attack the Nazis, and Jones rescues Gina. Ignoring further warnings, the pair descend and find Noah's Ark. Voss captures them and explains his theory: every flood myth in history points to the Great Circle. In his telling, God granted Noah its power so he could travel the world, gather two of every animal and repopulate the earth. Voss wants that power for the Nazis, and he activates it, causing another Great Flood.

  Jones and Voss brawl until the unstable power of the Ark kills Voss. Locus teleports the Ark away through another portal and averts the flood. Gina and Jones share feelings for each other, yet she parts ways with him for the sake of her career. A secret ending shows a hidden mural with every Great Circle location pointing toward the South Pole. There, footprints in the snow lead away from the Ark, suggesting that Locus survived.

  The downloadable expansion The Order of Giants takes place during the Vatican City portion of the main game. Jones meets Father Orlando Ricci, a young scholar researching a legendary figure called the Nameless Crusader. The crusader's helmet and armor lie in a secret chamber under a palace built by Pope Paul IV. Ricci was barred from the palace, so he asks Jones to search it and then bring his findings to the Ricci family estate in Rome. Jones finds the armor and a key to the underground tomb of a giant named Junia. Inside is the first of three pieces of a carved stone cylinder.

  On the way to the estate, Jones notices that Mussolini's Blackshirts are also hunting for Ricci. The other two cylinder pieces lie in the tombs of two more giants. One is Abgal, an undefeated gladiator known as "the Minotaur," and the other is Gibborim, the Nameless Crusader. While collecting the pieces, Jones meets members of a modern Cult of Mithras lurking in Rome's sewers. The finished cylinder turns out to be a key to the resting chamber of Abgal, who is still alive.

  Ricci then runs off with the cylinder and is exposed as the head of the Cult of Mithras. He hopes to sacrifice Abgal in order to gain enlightenment. Jones follows him into the temple, defeats the cult and opens the gate to Abgal's chamber. Ricci ambushes Jones, but as the cultist tries to stab Abgal, the giant wakes and strangles him. Abgal raises his chamber into the middle of the Colosseum and challenges Jones to a fight. Jones wins and makes his way back to Vatican City, where the main story's events carry on.

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• 4. An Unlikely Hero

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  According to creative director Axel Torvenius, Indiana Jones is not a gunslinger. He called the character a "teacher and a somewhat clumsy archeologist." That description guided the whole combat design. The team deprioritized guns and made them a last resort. Many firearms are available, but Jones dies quickly in a gunfight, and every shot attracts the attention of nearby enemies. Ammunition for his revolver is scarce.

  The developers also considered Jones a lucky character, so they made the game generous. Pick-ups are abundant, and the player can escape a fight quickly, so firing a gun is never compulsory. Describing him as an "unlikely" hero, the team wanted melee to feel "semi-chaotic." Jones has to rely on his wits and improvise with whatever he can find. Shovels, wrenches and broomsticks become weapons, and many objects can be thrown to distract guards. Most of these weapons break easily, although some can be repaired.

  Stealth follows the same spirit. Jones can crouch behind cover, hide bodies and wear disguises to enter restricted areas. Some high-level enemies see through a disguise, and stealing or behaving menacingly will blow it. Every action that takes effort, from sprinting to climbing, drains stamina. Bread and fruit found in the world add bonuses to health and stamina, and bandages restore lost health.

  The point of view matters too. The game is primarily first-person, as earlier MachineGames projects were, and the team chose it to set the game apart from third-person adventures. It also puts the player inside the role of Jones. Cutscenes and some actions switch to third-person so the character can be seen on screen as much as possible. As with Wolfenstein II, the team built a full-body model of the player character, which remains visible even in first-person.

  The whip was the hardest piece. It serves traversal, puzzles and combat. Aiming at an enemy's upper limbs disarms him, while aiming at the lower limbs trips him toward Jones. Simulating its physics was difficult, and level designers felt they had to build scenarios in which it works consistently. To get the crack right, the team consulted a Swedish bullwhip champion for visual and audio references.

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• 5. Hubs, Mysteries and Puzzles

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  Vatican City was the first of the game's large "hub" levels, and it served as the vertical slice, the early build used to test the whole design. The team called it the most complicated level in the game, since it was where they experimented with different design choices. Gizeh and Sukhothai are also big sandbox locations that the player can explore freely. The structure drew on Metro Exodus from 2019, which pairs a linear narrative with large areas of optional exploration. It also drew on the Uberkommandant missions in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus from 2017, which let players revisit levels. The team wanted the extra longevity.

  The Vatican could not be a one-to-one recreation of the real city. The developers were unable to funnel players across the major locations or have them explore certain key buildings. To make the sandbox feel rich, they first designed "treasure hunts," essentially fetch quests, which they later reworked into "mysteries" with richer narratives. These stayed short, or enriched the main story, so they would not pull the player off the optimal path. To make the locations authentic, the team read books, studied images and imagined how each place would have looked in the 1930s.

  Immersive sims, which offer several ways to infiltrate and reach an objective, shaped much of the level design. Disguises added one more way to interact with the map. The team also made the interface diegetic, which means it appears inside the fiction through Indiana's journal. Hannah Hoffman, a member of the level design team, pushed for a "living world" in which attentive players find small ways to interact with non-player characters. An optional waypoint system arrived late in development.

  Early on, the team drew a pie chart showing how much of the game belonged to six pillars: Hand-to-Hand, Platforming, Exploration and Puzzles, Infiltration, Set-Pieces, and Shooting. They spent a long time balancing these and set big set-pieces against slower moments of exploring and unraveling mysteries. Andersson called the result an "adventure-first" game. Adventure games from LucasArts, including Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis in 1992, were a major source of inspiration. Exploration pays off through Adventure Books, which grant permanent boosts such as better weapon durability, stronger combat skills, and more health and stamina. Adventure Points, earned by photographing objects of interest, opening safes and chests, and collecting relics and field notes, pay for the perks.

  Puzzles were meant to be complicated and varied, but the team worried that players might look up solutions on YouTube and break their own immersion. So the camera became a hint machine. Photographing a puzzle repeatedly makes Indiana offer more clues. Players who care less about puzzles can lower the adventure difficulty separately from the combat difficulty.

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• 6. Cast, Camera and Score

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  Jerk Gustafsson described his goal as a "lost Indiana Jones adventure from the 1980s." He wanted the same "tone and spirit" as Raiders of the Lost Ark and matinee adventure movies without repeating old plot threads. The team worked with cinematographer Kyle Klutz, the game's Director of Photography, to imitate Steven Spielberg's filmmaking style. The result was MachineGames' biggest game to date, with nearly four hours of cutscenes. Because Axis Powers forces and propaganda appear so often, the game opens with a cultural sensitivity warning. It says the game and its developers condemn the Axis Powers' war crimes.

  The game uses the likeness of Harrison Ford, yet the voice and motion capture belong to Troy Baker. Ford was never considered for the role because of his age. Howard did not want Baker at first, as he later told him in a Zoom meeting. Baker also turned the part down at first, finding it too daunting, until MachineGames' motion capture team changed his mind. Dozens of actors auditioned, and when only Baker and one other remained, the team picked Baker every time. Because Indiana is a polyglot, Baker worked with language coaches to perform some lines in Italian or Latin.

  Tony Todd came to play Locus almost by accident. Torvenius and other developers, dissatisfied with the actors who had auditioned, half-jokingly pitched Todd. When he turned out to be available, they felt he brought an entirely different angle to the character's background. It became his final voice acting role. Marios Gavrilis auditioned for Voss believing it was a new Wolfenstein game and learned the truth in late 2021. He felt he would have failed the audition had he known. To build the villain, Gavrilis rewatched the films, paying close attention to Ronald Lacey's Arnold Toht and Paul Freeman's René Belloq, and added "a bit of Klaus Kinski flavour." Gustafsson called Voss a "hobby psychologist" who turns Indiana's obsession with the past against him. When Gavrilis caught COVID-19, the stuntman Nicklas Hansson briefly took over on set. Alessandra Mastronardi plays Gina Lombardi.

  On the audio side, a team led by Peter Ward rewatched the films and recreated Ben Burtt's sound design. In Ward's words, they "did hundreds of hours of original recordings, using props like the whip, the fedora, the leather jacket, and lots of different shoe types on lots of different surfaces." Gordy Haab composed the score, building on the work of John Williams. Haab and 86 musicians recorded it at Abbey Road Studios, where Williams originally recorded the score for Raiders of the Lost Ark. "Marion's Theme" and "Raiders March" had to be re-recorded and re-orchestrated because of mechanical copyright. For texture, Haab chose percussion he called "very interesting," such as the jawbone, to give the game a sense of space.

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• 7. Platforms and Light

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  The game runs on Motor, MachineGames' custom fork of id Tech 7. It was built around ray tracing, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing is required on every platform. Ray-traced global illumination calculates indirect light from sources like the sun, producing natural fall-off, contact shadows and shadowed crevices. On Windows, MachineGames partnered with Nvidia to add path tracing, which replaces the static cube maps on glass reflections and calculates sun shadows per pixel. All cutscenes render in real time, in either 16:9 or cinematic 21:9.

  Hair uses a strand-based system rather than the traditional hair cards, because close-up faces in cinematic cutscenes demanded more detail. It also simplified the artists' workflow. The Steam Deck and Xbox Series S get less than half the maximum number of strands of other platforms. The team limited strands on animals to certain creatures such as spiders and monkeys. In September 2025 the game became the first to support RTX Hair, which uses Linear Swept Spheres, a primitive introduced with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50 series cards.

  Consoles needed compromises. MachineGames degraded the global illumination rather than remove it, so it is lower on consoles than the lowest Windows setting. Xbox Series X renders at an internal 1800p with dynamic scaling to hold 60 frames per second. PlayStation 5 runs between 1200p and 1800p, while PlayStation 5 Pro reaches 1440p to 4K. The Xbox Series S runs at 1080p and 60 frames per second, with graphical cutbacks and a smaller file size.

  The game was announced in January 2021, with a teaser trailer full of Easter eggs and hints about the setting. The title, story details and first gameplay footage arrived on the 18th of January 2024, during the Xbox Developer Direct presentation. Release came on the 9th of December 2024 for Windows and Xbox Series X/S as a timed console exclusive. Premium and Collector's editions gave three days of early access from the 6th of December 2024, along with an outfit inspired by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The Collector's Edition added a SteelBook case, a journal like Jones's and an 11-inch globe marking key story locations, with space for hidden storage.

  The exclusivity was a late change. The original contract between Bethesda and Disney called for a multiplatform launch. It was amended to drop PlayStation 5 when Microsoft acquired Bethesda's parent company, ZeniMax Media, in March 2021. Disney felt that Windows and Xbox Series X/S formed a large enough market. Even so, a PlayStation 5 version arrived on the 17th of April 2025. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer pointed to the strong reception of the earlier multiplatform games Sea of Thieves, Pentiment, Grounded and Hi-Fi Rush. He called multiplatform development "a strategy that works for us."

  A Nintendo Switch 2 version followed on the 12th of May 2026. MachineGames learned late in production that it was possible and wanted comparable visual quality without cutting content. Crowd density was a concern because of the weak CPU, but only one area was affected. Torvenius considered the visuals equal to the Xbox Series S. The frame rate is capped at 30 frames per second. Docked, the game renders at 540p and upscales to 1080p with DLSS, and handheld output drops to 720p. Textures and audio were compressed to fit a Switch 2 game card rather than a Game-Key Card, so players need no online connection.

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• 8. Reception and Expansion

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  Metacritic labeled the reviews "generally favorable," and 94% of critics on OpenCritic recommended the game. Critics called it "immersive" and said the melee, puzzles and first-person view captured Indiana Jones as he appears in the movies. Jordan Middler of Video Games Chronicle liked that side quests felt as meaningful as main quests. He also praised the puzzles and a hint system that did not shout the answer. Vatican City drew special acclaim, and several critics compared the level design to modern Deus Ex games and Dishonored.

  Not everyone agreed. Several critics found the stealth system "simplistic," and some felt the long early stay in Vatican City interrupted the story's flow. Ash Parrish of The Verge wrote that the game "would've been better as a movie," calling the gameplay simple and boring. Luke Reilly of IGN took the opposite view, writing that it "may well be the best Indiana Jones movie." Katharine Castle of Eurogamer praised a "gripping and memorable global conspiracy plot" and said the game restored the franchise's legacy after disappointments such as Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008 and Dial of Destiny in 2023. Alex Donaldson of VG247 called it one of the best licensed games in history. Rick Lane of The Guardian praised the story's political relevance.

  Harrison Ford called Baker's performance "brilliant." He used the game to voice support for video game performers who went on strike in 2025 to protest the use of artificial intelligence to duplicate their work. The game was the second best-selling title in the United States in its launch week. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said 4 million players had played it by January 2025. When the PlayStation 5 version arrived, it became that console's best-selling game of its release week.

  Several year-end lists placed the game in the top ten: sixth for GamingBolt, eighth for the Associated Press and tenth for The Guardian. Eurogamer named it Game of the Year. Nominations included Game of the Year at the D.I.C.E. Awards and Best Game at the 22nd British Academy Games Awards. Baker appears in lead performer categories at several ceremonies, and the score drew nominations including the 68th Annual Grammy Awards.

  The Order of Giants arrived on the 4th of September 2025. It was meant as a "natural extension" of the campaign and explores the origin of the Nephilim Order. Torvenius said it does not affect the main story but adds lore. A three-tier system adjusts its difficulty according to how far the player has progressed in the main campaign. Metacritic called its reviews "mixed or average." Critics enjoyed the inventive puzzles but were disappointed that it added no new features, and its small scale made it feel inessential. In October 2025, MachineGames added a New Game Plus mode and an extra ending scene to the game.

  As for more Indiana Jones games, Lucasfilm Games vice president and general manager Douglas Reilly said the studio was focused on making the game and its expansion succeed. He also pointed to "a lot of space in between the films where we could tell more and more Indiana Jones stories."

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