The best Indiana Jones adventure in years does not star Harrison Ford, exactly, and it is not even a movie. It is a video game — and as of this week, April 17, 2025, a whole lot more people can finally play it. “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle” has arrived on PlayStation 5, months after launching on Xbox and PC, and its expansion to Sony’s console opens one of the most pleasant surprises in recent memory to a massive new audience. If you wrote this off as another cash-in licensed game, we get it. You were wrong, and we were happily wrong too.
Let us set expectations properly, because “licensed movie game” carries decades of baggage. For years, adaptations of beloved film properties were shovelware — rushed, ugly, soulless products designed to slap a famous face on a store shelf. “The Great Circle” is the opposite of that. It was built by MachineGames, the Swedish studio behind the modern “Wolfenstein” revival, developers who know how to make a game feel weighty, purposeful, and dripping with period atmosphere. Handing Indy to this team turned out to be an inspired match, and the results speak for themselves. Warning: beyond this point there are spoilers for “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle” and its 1937 globetrotting mystery.
If you wrote this off as another cash-in licensed game, we get it. You were wrong, and we were happily wrong too.”
The premise slots neatly into the classic Indy timeline. Set in 1937, comfortably between the events of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “The Last Crusade,” the game sends Indiana Jones (Troy Baker) chasing a globe-spanning mystery tied to a series of ancient sites — the Great Circle of the title — with Nazis, naturally, lurking at every turn. It is pure pulp-adventure comfort food, the exact register these stories live in, and it understands that the appeal of Indy is not just the whip and the fights but the creeping dread of a dark tomb and the thrill of a puzzle only he can crack.
The boldest design choice, and the one that had people skeptical before launch, is the first-person perspective. You see the world largely through Indy’s eyes, whip in hand, which sounds like it might strip away the cinematic feel — until you realize it makes the exploration, the ducking through cobwebbed ruins, and the improvised fistfights feel astonishingly present. The game smartly slips into third-person for climbing and big set-piece moments, so you still get those iconic silhouette shots of the fedora against the light. It is a hybrid that has no right to work as well as it does.
Then there is the voice. Troy Baker is one of the finest performers in the medium, and his take on Indiana Jones is uncanny — he channels Harrison Ford’s cadence, the exasperated grumble, the dry wit, so precisely that you stop noticing it is not Ford within about ten minutes. The game pairs that performance with a digital likeness of Ford himself, and the combination sells the illusion completely. It is the rare case of a franchise finding a way to keep a character alive and authentic without needing the original star on set, and it is done with obvious care rather than cynicism.
Harrison Ford has made clear that “Dial of Destiny” was his farewell to the role, which left a real question hanging over the whole franchise: what is Indiana Jones without Ford? “The Great Circle” quietly offers one answer. You do not necessarily need to recast the man on screen to keep telling great Indy stories — you can hand the character to a different medium and a gifted performer and let the adventures continue. That is a more interesting path forward than yet another anxious reboot casting search.
The PS5 release also comes with the promise of more to explore, as the developers have additional story content on the way to expand Indy’s globetrotting further. That is a good sign for a game clearly built to be lived in rather than rushed through. For a title that could have been a disposable tie-in, the level of investment on display — in atmosphere, in performance, in respect for the source — is the whole story here.
For those of us tracking Indiana Jones across films, and now games, “The Great Circle” earns a real place in that lineup rather than sitting off to the side as a novelty. It captures the spirit of the character better than some of the actual movies managed, and it does it with craft and affection. If you own a PS5 and you have ever loved a good tomb, a bad Nazi, and a hero who solves problems with equal parts brains and a leather whip, this is the adventure you have been waiting for. The fedora, it turns out, fits a controller just fine.
What Do You Think? Does “The Great Circle” prove that Indiana Jones can thrive without Harrison Ford by moving into games and gifted voice work, or does the character ultimately need a face on the big screen to survive? Was the first-person perspective a stroke of genius or a gamble that only paid off because the rest of the game is so strong? And if this is the future of the franchise, would you rather see more Indy video games or a proper recast for the movies?
See you on the next binge!
