Indiana Jones and the Great Circle isn’t just good. It’s excellent. If you’re excited about playing the game on launch day (or beyond) and want to get the best deal possible, then look no further.
There’s an awful lot behind this door, lemme tell ya. Hours of adventure, of tension, of action, of sci-fi strangeness. It’ll be great. Unfortunately the door itself is bugged out so you’ll need to reload a quicksave or something to get it open.
It's not just because he's a Nazi. It's because he's a smartass> Nazi. As the main antagonist in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, Emmerich Voss vacates the archetypal armchair usually reserved for secondary fascist goons, so that he can goosestep straight into the big boy seat himself. He smiles with all the sleaze of right-hand-man Major Toht, the grubby gestapo who gets that right hand burned in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yet he also engages in the pseudo-intellectual trash talk of the main archaeological rivals to Jones, like Rene Belloq or Walter Donovan. He is a hideous grab bag of all the things that make an instantly detestable villain in the series. But there's something else. Voss is so immediately and gutturally hateable because he resembles a type of racist encountered not in the 1930s, but one you've probably met today: the asshole you meet on the internet.
Warning: Here be spoilers.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Everyone knows about ‘hardback’ and ‘softback’ books, but have you heard of the quickly discontinued ‘rice puddingback’? While hiring so many rice grain artists to transpose the blurbs in beautiful calligraphy made for an impressive spectacle, they were eventually banned after several fatal train slippage and/or smellage incidents. Ah well! This week, it’s Charlene Putney, who’s been writing for games for over ten years, including bits for Divinity: Original Sin 2, Baldur's Gate 3, NUTS, and Saltsea Chronicles! Cheers Charlene! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
Today's door is shimmering and promises dark magics within. It's an unlikely marriage of big budget publisher and a genre beloved most by smaller development teams. What mastery will unlock the door and expose the vast arenas within? Why, clicking to read more, of course.
Sundays are for, I hope, upgrading my PC swiftly and successfully and then getting down to business. Think of all the games I can now play! But I'll probably just play Dune Imperium.
Gail Mackenzie-Smith in Electric Lit wrote a Dear John letter breaking up with Wordle.
You could open today's door, sure. You could also blow it up with an explosive, though. Or shoulder-barge your way through the wall beside it. Or plant some C4 on the ceiling and go up and over. Or I think that's a load-bearing pillar over there - may as well just bring down the entire advent calendar to find out what's behind today's door.
Morning, all. Hope you're keeping those game-playing hands nice and toasty this winter. You can do it however you like. Wear gloves, huff on them, sit on them, give a fluffy cat a good squeeze. I personally like to clasp a mug of almost-too-hot coffee while I gaze at my Steam library wondering where the hours have gone. To each their own. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!
If you’d told me last year that face of all-out, GPU venerating, fully ray-traced PC game visual excess would be that of a de-aged Harrison Ford, I’d have asked which exact colour of paint you’d been eating. And yet here we are, with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle loving its ray tracing so much that the effects can’t ever be fully switched off.
Open a door, then back here again, open a door, then back here again. It's as if we're caught in some infernal loop. Thankfully we get to talk to you, our attractive friends, in the moments between.
OK, ready to go again. Let's open the door.