I haven’t played a lot of Indiana Jones games in the past, but I did find myself thinking about how the formula of the films can get adapted to games. I played The Fate of Atlantis, which leans on the puzzle solving aspects. I also played The Emperor’s Tomb which mostly tries to replicate the action aspects, along with a few platforming things. It’s also impossible to not think about the video game franchises who have tried to replicate the feel of Indiana Jones, namely Tomb Raider and Uncharted.

But ultimately this game isn’t trying to be any of those. The actual best comparison that I’ve heard is Dishonored. Like that game, this is primarily a stealth game with a focus on melee combat. If anything, it’s actually even more focused on melee combat, despite featuring automatic weapons.

So how does the gameplay work and—more importantly—is it good? Basically, you sneak around and beat up fascists (of the Italian or Nazi variety). You can pick up pretty much whatever in the environment–bottles, brooms, pipe wrenches–and use them as makeshift weapons. They have limited durability, so you’re constantly swapping out weapons. You also can’t hold more than one at a time. I think this is a really inspired design choice that leads to a very immediate feeling to the game. You actually feel like you could be Indiana Jones improvising his way through these situations.

The stealth gameplay is also fairly stripped down. I’m very ambivalent about this. On the one hand, you really just need to sneak around and be careful. On the other hand, it’s very easy to get noticed if you’re not careful. Perhaps as a balance, the enemies are pretty stupid. They can’t see very far, a lot of them don’t move, the ones that do have very short and simple loops. Even if you alert them, they go back to their normal state fairly quickly.

Another mechanic that feels appropriate to the source material is disguises. You even get some specific disguises that are from Raiders: an Egyptian worker disguise and a Nazi officer uniform. Unfortunately this mechanic is rather OP. Once you don a disguise which allows you to go to a certain area, your only risks are that you can’t steal stuff and captains will be able to see through your disguise. There’s a handful of interesting challenges in this situation, but for the most part it makes the game a breeze. I guess this is satisfying after sneaking around for a while, but it removes the challenge entirely. Each of the 3 main areas has a disguise that gets you access to everything, not even having to switch disguises for different areas.

The flip side to the stealth is the action. If you get caught, you’ll have to fight off the fascists. Earlier in the game, they’ll all try to fight you in melee. Because your improvised melee weapons can only give a handful of hits, you’ll often find yourself fighting barehanded. There’s dodging, parrying, grappling, and punching. It’s not super challenging in typical gameplay, but it is fairly visceral and decently fun. Later on in the game you can use guns, but there’s no reloading and shooting guns will alert every fascist within earshot. As a result, I found myself avoiding using guns—except as melee weapons—in almost all cases.

There’s also a little bit of platforming in this game. It’s very whip-centric. You can use your whip to climb walls or swing across gaps. It’s perfectly functional, but also nothing special.

The game is mostly structured around 3 mini open worlds. I do appreciate that they’re not massive and care is taken to reduce Icon Fatigue, but it still has the standard ratio of interesting, handcrafted quests to random collectibles and uninteresting documents. Dishonored or Deus Ex got away with a lot more of these because they contributed to the worldbuilding, whereas slightly-fantasy-1930s doesn’t really need that.

Finally, you have the puzzles. These are frankly pretty easy. Very escape room-esque. I do feel like I actually “solved” most of these, rather than them being really trivial or having to look up every aspect because it’s too impenetrable.

I did have a lot of fun clearing out fascist bases by sneaking around, but I don’t think the gameplay fully congealed. It’s just kinda too easy! I think a lot of choices were made for vibes instead of being fun to actually play.

This might all be fine if the story could pick up the slack. I will say it’s better than Crystal Skull. I’d say it’s about on par with Dial of Destiny, which isn’t exactly a compliment. Our antagonist is Voss, a Nazi archeologist. He’s… fine. They try to change up the Nazi villain archetype by having him use psychology to fuck with people, but it doesn’t really come across. Indy’s erstwhile companion is Italian journalist Gina who is looking for her kidnapped sister.

SPOILERS BELOW!

The plot itself is about mysterious stones found at various places around the world that create a Great Circle around the planet. Sure, whatever. We eventually find out that these stones are written in Adamic, the supposed First Language, i.e. pre tower of Babel. Speaking the words written on them does magic! In the final level we actually find out that a) noah’s ark was under the Zigguarat of Ur (sure, fine, whatever), and b) the stones slot into the wheel of the ark and kinda-sorta explain the flood story.

There’s just so much to unpack here. Adamic is real and magic! Noah’s ark is real and true-from-a-certain-point-of-view! Magic stones from the ark were placed all over the world and were built on top of because…? I know that this is a fantasy property, but a lot of this gets pulled out too late and isn’t well explained.