In addition to improvisational brawling and sneaking, there’s another pillar of the Indiana Jones experience MachineGames wants to lean into with the Great Circle: Puzzle solving. Giant stone gears turning improbable ancient machinery, assorted cups and whether a carpenter would be caught dead holding them, I would expect no less from an outing with Dr. Jones.
In a conversation with PC Gamer global editor-in-chief Phil Savage at Gamescom, MachineGames creative director Jens Andersson explained how these puzzles will challenge us, but ideally not send us to our phones to Google the solution.
“We need these puzzles to be challenging,” Andersson explained. “We don’t want to dumb them down into this kind of cinematic set-piece: You pull the lever and the old mechanics release, it needs to be proper puzzles.”
According to Andersson, the Great Circle will have a large variety of those proper puzzles, which hopefully means we won’t get that “ugh, this again” feeling of Half-Life Alyx’s hologram minigame or BioShock’s blasted pipes. The goal was “finding the balance to make them challenging, but not blocking you,” and Andersson even declared that “Players should never get stuck in this game—then we have failed.”
It’s a thorny balance: I like a good puzzle, and I love when a game surprises me, but we’ve all run into games that are so obtuse, or bring the pacing to such a grinding halt, that scampering off to a handy guide or Reddit thread just makes sense. To head that behavior off, The Great Circle will have optional in-game hints accessible through Indy’s camera.
“We have it as a hint system, so if you do get stuck, we don’t want you to go to YouTube to look up the solution, because that’s immersion-breaking and bad,” said Andersson. “We want to keep you in the game. But we do recognize that skill levels vary. So you can snap a photo of the puzzle, and Indy will help, give you a suggestion, you can keep going if you need more information.”
I like the sound of this mechanic, especially since you have to opt into it. The other extreme from being stumped by a game is having your chatty protagonist or their goofy sidekick go all “Hm, a lever, wonder if it’ll do anything to that machinery we saw earlier…” the second you enter a room. Thanks for the tip, Dora the Explorer, but I really think I could have handled this one.
I’ve pretty much gotten used to having my phone or Steam’s browser overlay on hand to help with playing games—it’s one of those things like save scumming that I don’t like in theory, but doesn’t bother me all that much when I’m actually playing a game. Still, I’ll be interested to see if the Great Circle’s in-game hints will help with my immersion. But this all raises another issue: Won’t someone please think of the livelihoods of our yeoman videogame guide YouTubers?