There was never a world where Indiana Jones and the Great Circle would be anything other than a first-person adventure game, says developer MachineGames.
At a Develop:Brighton talk attended by GamesRadar+, MachineGames design director Jens Andersson says first-person "was a given for us" and that "there was no choice for us, we love that perspective. It's a great way of telling stories."
"If you're going to be Indiana Jones, you need to look through his eyes, you need to feel like him."
Thanks in large part to the game's brilliant writing, direction, world design, acting, and sure, first-person perspective, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle succeeds chiefly because it makes you feel like Indy while playing it. Andersson says nailing that element was a time-consuming affair, if not the most challenging part of the game's development.
"How would we make you as a first-person player feel like Indiana Jones? We knew that would be really hard, but actually it was one of the things that we felt we hit," says Andersson. "It took years, of course, but it wasn't the hardest part making this game. It was a lot of the other things that I would highlight as 'we didn't get this right until at the very end.'"
Whatever sorcery was happening behind the scenes at MachineGames clearly worked. The game's sitting at a respectable 86 on Metacritic, and our own 5/5-star review calls the game "The best adventure Indy has embarked on in over 30 years."
