(Though I haven’t played the new Indy game, and have heard good things about its story - anyone with an opinion to share there?)
The graphics are great, there's a ton of attention to detail, the environments are large and interesting to explore. Mostly. The Himalaya segment was linear and was basically walking straight from the start to the end. It ends with a runaway vehicle segment which is unintentionally hilarious because it's clearly going in an infinite loop but trying to create the illusion of imminent doom. I haven't played beyond the opening of Shanghai- which I suspect to also be linear. The Vatican and Egypt parts of the game are a fairly enjoyable mix of exploration, minor platforming and puzzle solving, and an alright combat system for a mostly non-combat game (notable exceptions to enjoyability of the game post-Vatican below).
The puzzles are okay, I guess. It's a game aimed at mass popularity, there's nothing here that will make you think too hard. It's mostly immediately obvious what to do, the only thing that might slow a reasonably clever person down is just not noticing some relevant object in the environment. This isn't Talos Principle or even Portal.
Now for what's fucking awful: Gina. Holy shit. They introduce a woman after the first large section of the game who exists to do one thing: Prove she's a woman who's better than Indiana Jones. There were definitely some feminists on the writing team, and this is their character. Any time she's with you in a ruin, which is frequent, she is constantly shouting out what you should do, and sometimes solves the fucking puzzle herself. In a single-player game. They added a puzzle, then also added a character that solves it. When she isn't playing the game instead of you, she makes it impossible to enjoy looking around the environment, because she's constantly telling you to go break a wall or something. I felt like Basil Fawlty for a significant part of the game. It isn't even a tutorial thing: She shows up many hours in, and some of her comments pointing out objects are things which you have probably already interacted with. Hey, thanks for telling me about that obvious golden mirror in the middle of the room the instant we walked in, it looks a lot like the ten others I've already manipulated. Oh, I should use it to shine light on the obvious light target? Great, thanks, this is my first puzzle game ever and also I'm just a retard playing a retarded male character, so I wouldn't have figured that out. Thanks for taking the puzzle out of your PUZZLE GAME.
She saves his life many times, but I can't think of a time he really saves her. He punches out about a hundred nazis and does ten minutes of scaffold gymnastics to get onto a blimp, and she's already there (and saves his life again). He buys a lighter from a woman in a town after they both go to Egypt, and when he mentions it, she not only somehow knows the exact woman, she knows that Jones was scammed. Jones basically gets tricked into feeding an animal, finds out it's a snake, freaks out a little, and she and the other woman in the room laugh at him for being a coward. There's one male priest who's a reasonable character, but otherwise, every male character is either a bumbling idiot, a nazi, or a brown semi-verbal giant. Meanwhile, the female characters are: A hyper-competent professor who guides Jones through Egypt, a woman who basically figured out the entire secret of the game and Jones spends the storyline of the game just rediscovering her earlier work, and the aforementioned Gina.
They made a game about Indiana Jones, but the writing team hated the fact he was a man and used a substantial part of the game to "prove" that their self-insert woman was better in every way. A puzzle game where the designers considered it more important to have their character prove her supremacy over an icky man than actually allowing the player to play the game and solve the puzzles himself.
Whether or not you can enjoy it after the Vatican arc will basically come down to whether you can tolerate being back-seat-gamed by an actual NPC whose only purpose is to show how much better women are than men.
Sounds like, as much as I am interested in “the Great Circle” (like, the real life idea that the game aped), I don’t have it in me to put up with this digital Phoebe Waller-Bridge they shoehorned in
The graphics are great, there's a ton of attention to detail, the environments are large and interesting to explore. Mostly. The Himalaya segment was linear and was basically walking straight from the start to the end. It ends with a runaway vehicle segment which is unintentionally hilarious because it's clearly going in an infinite loop but trying to create the illusion of imminent doom. I haven't played beyond the opening of Shanghai- which I suspect to also be linear. The Vatican and Egypt parts of the game are a fairly enjoyable mix of exploration, minor platforming and puzzle solving, and an alright combat system for a mostly non-combat game (notable exceptions to enjoyability of the game post-Vatican below).
The puzzles are okay, I guess. It's a game aimed at mass popularity, there's nothing here that will make you think too hard. It's mostly immediately obvious what to do, the only thing that might slow a reasonably clever person down is just not noticing some relevant object in the environment. This isn't Talos Principle or even Portal.
Now for what's fucking awful: Gina. Holy shit. They introduce a woman after the first large section of the game who exists to do one thing: Prove she's a woman who's better than Indiana Jones. There were definitely some feminists on the writing team, and this is their character. Any time she's with you in a ruin, which is frequent, she is constantly shouting out what you should do, and sometimes solves the fucking puzzle herself. In a single-player game. They added a puzzle, then also added a character that solves it. When she isn't playing the game instead of you, she makes it impossible to enjoy looking around the environment, because she's constantly telling you to go break a wall or something. I felt like Basil Fawlty for a significant part of the game. It isn't even a tutorial thing: She shows up many hours in, and some of her comments pointing out objects are things which you have probably already interacted with. Hey, thanks for telling me about that obvious golden mirror in the middle of the room the instant we walked in, it looks a lot like the ten others I've already manipulated. Oh, I should use it to shine light on the obvious light target? Great, thanks, this is my first puzzle game ever and also I'm just a retard playing a retarded male character, so I wouldn't have figured that out. Thanks for taking the puzzle out of your PUZZLE GAME.
She saves his life many times, but I can't think of a time he really saves her. He punches out about a hundred nazis and does ten minutes of scaffold gymnastics to get onto a blimp, and she's already there (and saves his life again). He buys a lighter from a woman in a town after they both go to Egypt, and when he mentions it, she not only somehow knows the exact woman, she knows that Jones was scammed. Jones basically gets tricked into feeding an animal, finds out it's a snake, freaks out a little, and she and the other woman in the room laugh at him for being a coward. There's one male priest who's a reasonable character, but otherwise, every male character is either a bumbling idiot, a nazi, or a brown semi-verbal giant. Meanwhile, the female characters are: A hyper-competent professor who guides Jones through Egypt, a woman who basically figured out the entire secret of the game and Jones spends the storyline of the game just rediscovering her earlier work, and the aforementioned Gina.
They made a game about Indiana Jones, but the writing team hated the fact he was a man and used a substantial part of the game to "prove" that their self-insert woman was better in every way. A puzzle game where the designers considered it more important to have their character prove her supremacy over an icky man than actually allowing the player to play the game and solve the puzzles himself.
Whether or not you can enjoy it after the Vatican arc will basically come down to whether you can tolerate being back-seat-gamed by an actual NPC whose only purpose is to show how much better women are than men.
Thanks for the write up man, much appreciated!
Sounds like, as much as I am interested in “the Great Circle” (like, the real life idea that the game aped), I don’t have it in me to put up with this digital Phoebe Waller-Bridge they shoehorned in