Thirith on 3/6/2025 at 07:48
As I'm currently playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, I've been wondering about the best adaptations of films, books etc. At least so far (I'm still in the Vatican), The Great Circle is among the very best of these: they could have made it easy for themselves and made the game a Tomb Raider or Uncharted clone, as these games pretty much copied the Indiana Jones template to begin with. But there are so many design decisions and small touches that make this more than just a competent reskin of a video game template. Another such game is Alien Isolation, which does a perfect job of capturing not just the aesthetics of Ridley Scott's Alien but the tone and rhythms of the film.
Are there any other such great or even perfect adaptations that do a great job of matching the original they're adapting with game design? And what are the films, series, books etc. that people would love to see adapted this well? (I for one would love to see a Die Hard immersive sim with smartly chosen survival mechanisms that opens up the entire Nakatomi building and that lets you improvise on the fly, rather than locking you into FPS setpieces.)
PigLick on 3/6/2025 at 09:14
Genesis Lion King, end of thread.
PigLick on 3/6/2025 at 09:22
On a more serious note, I always thought the Stainless Steel Rat series of books by Harry Harrison would make a great imm sim style game with a good amount of tongue in cheek parody.
Starker on 3/6/2025 at 09:26
Perfect is in the eye of the beholder, but I can think of quite a few candidates, actually...
Speaking of Indiana Jones, of course Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis got the story and the humour exactly right.
One of the best examples I have to offer, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream absolutely nailed it as an adaptation. Not only does it feel like the original story, every addition the game made felt true to the original.
Telltale's The Walking Dead is pretty much a perfect non-superhero comic book adaptation. Well, at least the first game. I thought it was much better than the TV series even, to be honest.
Anchorhead to this day remains one the best Lovecraftian games to date and is even better after the rewrite it got a few years back, really getting the atmosphere right.
Witcher 3 is probably the most famous/successful example I can think of.
KOTOR felt very much old school Star Wars in a way I think most other games just didn't capture, especially coming out at the time of the Phantom Menace.
Betrayal at Krondor was so true to the world of Midkemia and so well written that people thought it was written by Feist himself.
Spec Ops: The Line is just a great adaptation of theme, if not the form of the book and the movie it draws inspiration from.
Tron 2.0 I don't see spoken of very frequently, but it got a lot of the aesthetics right and even had lightcycle races.
Oh, and of course South Park: The Stick of Truth was pretty much as true to the original as it could have been as far as adaptations go.
Malf on 3/6/2025 at 09:39
Well naturally, there's Goldeneye, but I suspect that's not as contemporary or PC-based as you're fishing for.
But continuing on the Bond-related theme, I have high hopes for IOI's upcoming Bond game, First Light.
Taking the Hitman formula and tweaking it to focus some more on action set-pieces should result in an excellent Bond experience.
While they're hard to play today unless you are lucky enough to have the GOG versions, the Riddick games are fantastic continuations of that character's story. It's also really cool playing a stealth game where you feel like a predator rather than the prey. There have been more games since then that also took this approach (like the Batman and Dishonored games), but the first Riddick was the first stealth focussed game I can remember playing that gave me that feeling.
Of course, I suspect this topic was partly inspired by both of our recent contributions to the "What are ya playin' in 2025?" thread, and to that end, while a lot of people are now experiencing fatigue with the slew of Star Wars "content" that Disney seem intent on pooping out, their games have been consistently great.
The Jedi Knight games that I played (Outcast and Academy) were excellent and feature the best lightsaber combat even to this day.
The two most recent Jedi-oriented games are also pretty damn good, Fallen Order and Survivor.
While I've not played it yet, I understand that Squadrons was well received.
And of course, I am finding Outlaws to be an excellent exploration of the seedy underworld of Star Wars, although I suspect I am at the same stage with it as you are with The Great Circle.
Stepping away from Star Wars, I always felt that TRON 2.0 was possibly the best medium change ever, and it made perfect sense that it should be a game.
Admittedly, I haven't played it recently, but I adored it at the time and loved its timeless graphics.
Yet for a more contemporary game, RoboCop: Rogue City effortlessly captures the flavour of the 80s movies.
Oh, and as I mentioned them up above, RockSteady's Batman games had a HUGE impact. Although personally, I still think the first game, Asylum, is the best of the bunch, being a tighter, more focussed experience.
Thirith on 3/6/2025 at 11:07
I admit that I was a bit startled when I read your line about Outlaws and then you suddenly mentioned Star Wars rather than spaghetti westerns. :cheeky:
I liked Squadrons a lot, but IMO it had the problem of falling between two stools - it was too arcadey to satisfy the fans of X-Wing and TIE Fighter, and it was too complex for people who just wanted to blow things up good, and that combined with rather minimal support meant it had little to no longevity.
I'm a bit annoyed at myself for not thinking of TRON 2.0, because that one was indeed a great example of taking an IP and translating it into a game. At the time I was afraid it might just be a sort of NOLF reskin, but there was enough there beyond the world and its aesthetics to make this feel like Tron.
Malf on 3/6/2025 at 11:19
Also, this is gonna come across as sacriligeous to LOTR nerds, but I found Shadow of Mordor more engaging than a lot of other media related to the books.
But then, I always found Tolkien a bit too twee; probably thanks to Dad giving me Conan to read before The Hobbit.
In the amount of pages it took Tolkien to introduce the various dwarves at the start of The Hobbit, R. E. Howard could have written 3 entire Conan stories.
And touching on Conan, while there have been plenty of games based on him and the Hyborian Age, few have actually been good.
But one that I found did actually treat the source material with a great deal of respect was actually FunCom's Age of Conan MMO. Playing it on a PvP server, where every player you met was a potential bastard just felt right (if frustrating at times thanks to poor class balance.)
To be honest, it was less about the gameplay, which was your basic WoW-style MMO, but more about the world building and lore nuggets. Visiting places from the stories was really cool, and handled really well.
Thirith on 3/6/2025 at 11:37
That raises a question, though: did you like Shadow of Mordor in spite of it being Tolkien, or was it a way of getting into Tolkien for you?
I guess that's what's at the heart of my question: there are probably adaptations that are good, even great games - but they're not particularly interesting as adaptations. What I love about the games I've mentioned is that they take the original material and translate it to games in cool ways, rather than e.g. making a great shooter or brawler that just happens to be an adaptation. The way that e.g. The Great Circle really gets that there's something endearingly clumsy about Indy, making him a more engaging character.
heywood on 3/6/2025 at 11:48
Tron 2.0 nailed it. It's a great game with some imm sim qualities.
There was another Tron game afterward from Bithell called Tron: Identity, but it was more of a puzzle/adventure/story game and got mixed reviews. I didn't play it. Bithell has another one called Tron: Catalyst coming out next month, but it appears to be an isometric shooter.
I wanted to play Alien Isolation, but never got to it. From the trailers it looked a lot like Doom 3.
Starker on 3/6/2025 at 11:57
Well, in that case, Aliens Versus Predator should probably be on the list. The way the different campaigns had unique gameplay mechanics and a different UI (down to the Yautja numbering system) should count for something at least, and the worldbuilding and story felt very much like Aliens. You could just tell the game was made by huge Alien/Predator nerds.
