Thirith on 3/6/2025 at 20:56

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I agree with you that The Great Circle doesn't do everything exactly like an Indiana Jones film, henke, but I don't agree that it is a case of "this thing is GOOD, and the source material was GOOD". There are such games, but you can see lots of design decisions in The Great Circle that clearly came from looking at the source material very closely - and in some cases, things were jettisoned, because a film and a game don't work the same way, and in some cases the developers decided to try and implement a feature from the films that makes sense in a game. There's the combination of tactility and friction that has annoyed some gamers: you don't just press the interaction button to unlock a door, you take out the key, you use it on the lock, you turn the key - which puts so much more of a focus on objects as objects that you carry, handle and discard than is the case in most games. Or the combat, which is inelegant, even clumsy, halfway between a desperate scramble and the goofiness of old-school slapstick. Those are decisions that come from studying what makes Indy Indy; if you were just designing a good game, you'd most likely leave these things out, because they're essentially characterisation by means of gameplay, and the characterisation is specifically Indy. There's also Indy's interest in the places, objects and mythologies he's investigating - and those translate into some of the slower moments of the game, making e.g. the trinket collecting feel different from the same kind of activity in your average open-world game.

Making a perfect adaptation for me is about these things and not about perfectly matching the source material bit for bit. It's taking apart the source material and thinking about what function the individual elements have, and deciding which of these can be translated into the medium and in what form. That's why e.g. Tomb Raider and Uncharted are both obviously, essentially inspired by Indiana Jones but why they're not Indiana Jones games, and why it takes more than reskinning the main character and giving them a whip and a hat.