Indy is back, this time in a new video game from MachineGames and Bethesda called Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Set within the same timeline as the movie, the game sees a young Indiana Jones (voiced by Troy Baker) begin a new adventure that will take him from his desk at Marshall College to the Vatican, the Forgotten Temples of the Sukhotai, the Himalayas, and back to Egypt for the first time since Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In fact, Great Circle takes place just a year after the events of the original movie, but before The Last Crusade. In other words, the game will finally show us what Indy was up to in the two-year gap between Raiders, which is set in 1936, and Crusade, which covers 1938. 1937 is a year in Indy’s life that has never been explored onscreen. The goal, according to MachineGames co-founder Jerk Gustafsson in an interview with EW, is for Great Circle to feel like “a long-lost Indy film from the 1980s.”
The first gameplay trailer, which was revealed during this year’s Xbox Developer Direct live stream event, shows just how closely Great Circle will stick to the aesthetic and tone of the original trilogy of films, down to Indy’s new swashbuckling companion, investigative Gina Lombardi (Alessandra Mastronardi), and all the cathartic shots of the hero beating the shit out of Nazis.
The game also introduces a new villain in Emmerich Voss (Marios Gavrilis), who is “searching for those major mysteries and those things that are unknown to the rest of the world,” according to Gustafsson. Tony Todd rounds out the cast as a mysterious villain named Locus, who, after stealing an artifact from Marshall College, sets the whole adventure in motion.
We also get some context for the game’s title in the trailer. Indy explains that “Throughout history mankind has built sites of great spiritual significance. If you were to draw a line through these sites around the globe, you’d get a perfectly aligned circle.” Something bigger than human history seems to be afoot once again for Indiana Jones.
While Gustafsson didn’t give away too much more than what’s in the trailer, he did confirm at least one important piece of information about this period in Indy’s life: “He has separated from Marion,” Gustafsson told EW. “We know that he is sort of lost again after that. He is adrift.”
It’s sad to hear Indy and Marion didn’t make it past a year, but something tells us these two lovebirds will turn out just fine in the end.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is out for Xbox Series X/S and PC in 2024.