Whoo, this is the first double-digit entry! I guess we'll stay here for a while now :P

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Chime, banana, suture, table, Mario.

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Yesterday evening I tried playing "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle" with a copy that a friend loaned me. That same friend insisted it was a great game and that I should definitely play it, but after a few hours in, I have to admit I'm underwhelmed. The game looks awesome, the art and design are top-notch, the acting (as little as I saw) is great, and it plays really well on my PC.

However, I felt like it was unnecessarily clunky. Fighting is really stiff (though, coming from "Hollow Knight: Silksong" I guess anything will feel stiff by comparison), and movement also feels weird. I'm fine with these if the story is good. However, I have a specific point that bothered me throughout the few hours I played: it's unnecessarily hard to find stuff.

There are keys all over the place, and you need to inspect every square centimeter of the map to be sure you didn't miss anything. I spent more time backtracking and scouring for the damn Rampart Key in the Vatican section (which is the very beginning of the game) than doing anything else. Rather than enjoy the immersion or the graphics, I was just getting frustrated with this task.

After backtracking some ten times or so, I realized that the key was at the very beginning of the map! It's on a wall that you might easily miss, as that zone has two exits: one takes you in front of the key, and the other doesn't. I took the one that doesn't almost every time, and then took the other one, but by that point I was starting to lose my patience, and running around blindly is, of course, a terrible way to find stuff.

When I started the game, I did see that there's a "guided mode" that, from what I understand, should point you to where your actual objectives are rather than having you find them. I originally left it turned off (which was the default) because I thought this would have me solve puzzles using a map or something similar-like finding something given some evidence and possible places where it could be. I didn't think this was so I didn't have to canvass every room on my way.

Another thing I thought was extremely silly was that I didn't realize Indi had a revolver until a couple of hours in, and I figured it out by mistake! This seemed a serious oversight. We're not even told in what kinds of situations the revolver is useful. Before Indi goes to the Vatican, we see him (and actually help him) pack his luggage for the trip, and at no point do we get any mention of a gun (or maybe we did and I missed it?).

Anyway, it could be that I still haven't reached that point in the game where it is needed, and maybe that's why I wasn't told about its existence? Still, there is a small movement tutorial section in which we replay one of Indi's memories in a temple, and I would expect it would've been straightforward (story-wise) to add a section where one has to press some faraway panels using the revolver. The fact they didn't do this makes it feel like they bolted it on ad hoc rather than it being an integral part of the game.

(Who knows. Maybe it isn't really that important, and that's why they don't say anything about it?)

When we're dropped into the first section (the entry of the Vatican), we're told to "please read the game manual from the pause menu." I did briefly leaf through it and learned some cool tips that would've been hard to learn otherwise, like the fact you can run + crouch to slide (which still feels like something that could've gone in the tutorial, if you ask me). But, "ain't nobody got time for that"! I want to jump straight into spoiling the fascists' plans!

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As I started to write this, I was pretty much convinced I was going to stop playing the game, but now that I've vented my frustrations, I actually think I'll give it another chance, but with guided mode turned on :) I hope it doesn't move the pendulum entirely the other way and make it end up feeling too easy¹!

Though there are also some other games I want to try, so who knows. In particular, there are two fishing games that have been going around my feed for a while now. I'm attracted to them even though I'm not a person who has ever gone out fishing or really knows much about it. One looks really fun (fish in the morning, then manage a sushi restaurant at night), while the other is more of a relaxing, ambient game (it even has an entirely idle mode where you just watch the guy fish). I don't have much to say about them yet, so I'll just leave the names here in case you're interested.

• Dave the Diver
• Cast n Chill

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Footnotes

1. Like finding stuff in Skyrim-that's sometimes way too easy and silly because you're literally pointed to every location you need to go to. Still a great game, though. ↩