Cracking the Design Puzzle on Indiana Jones and The Great Circle

How do you build a brainteaser worthy of Indiana Jones?

That’s the question the designers of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle asked themselves early on in creating the video game from Bethesda and MachineGames, in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games. And with the recent release of the new DLC, The Order of Giants, they took everything they learned even further.

First, designers had to bring the iconic character to life.

“Getting the character right was essential, from how he acts, responds, and sounds to how he moves through the world,” says Lucasfilm Games’ executive producer Craig Derrick. “Doing that in a predominantly first-person perspective, where the player is truly stepping into Indy’s shoes, was daunting at first. But once we cracked it, it felt like we were contributing a meaningful new chapter to his story and journey.”

The next challenge was figuring out what makes a good Indiana Jones puzzle, MachineGames lead level designer Andrew Yoder tells Lucasfilm.com. He unearthed some vital clues in Indy’s very first adventure.

“For me, where it really clicked was when I was rewatching Raiders of the Lost Ark,” he says. “There’s the great map room sequence where he’s got the headpiece to the Staff of Ra. It just captured everything that makes a great Indy puzzle: the hidden information on both sides of the headpiece, brushing away the sand, consulting the journal, and translating the hieroglyphs. And then there’s really powerful feedback once he’s actually socketed the thing in. So, for me, that was this aha moment.”

Zeke Virant, lead game designer at MachineGames, also credits the different elements the team used to break up the pacing. “A lot of the time [in games] when you start solving a puzzle, you really zero in on the contraption you need to move around,” he says. “But I feel like the level design team always wanted to get a traversal puzzle in there. There could be some other kind of trap door or another piece that needed to be retrieved from a secret chamber.”

“Part of it is the feeling of delight and discovery,” Yoder adds. “If you’re just doing one thing for the whole chunk of time, then it stops being surprising. So, finding ways to mix it up, making the players think about things in different ways, or look at it literally from a new perspective — [like in] Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with the big X on the floor. All those things are great.”

The same philosophy drove the design of the DLC, but the puzzles have a little more heft to them. “I think we had this idea of ‘boss puzzles’ that were basically bigger set piece puzzles than we had in the [base] game,” says Yoder. “A nice chunky puzzle. But even there, we had to be careful about making sure that we were mixing up the pacing and creating opportunities to use your full kit so it wasn’t just 10 minutes of brain-burning stress.”

“Especially for The Order of Giants, puzzle design was absolutely central,” Derrick agrees. “The best puzzles, in my opinion, are ones that give players an immediate sense of what the solution might be and then subvert those expectations in clever ways. The trick is making sure it never feels broken or unfair.

“It’s something we’ve carried forward from the classics like Monkey Island and earlier Indiana Jones titles, and it’s a tradition we’re proud to continue.”

Finally, the designers focused on getting players where they needed to go while making it feel as authentic as possible. They placed eye-catching visual cues like splashes of white paint, waving flags, and, in The Order of Giants, an adorable bird named Pio to mark the archaeologist’s path. But Indiana’s trademark whip presented a particular challenge.

“We aim really high on this stuff,” Yoder says. “For the longest time, the whip swings didn’t even have a marker [on the screen]. We were trying to solve it entirely in-world so the player would just know. We did layers and layers of things trying to make that work.

“One of the big goals is we want it to feel believable. We want the player to feel like, if I can interact with this, then I should be able to. We put in a lot of work between level design, game design, environment art, lighting, everybody trying to make sure that it works.”

“When I’ve watched people play it through,” Virant adds, “especially for all of the whip swings, people did have to continue looking around. I think that’s an aspect of our game. It feels natural. It really does feel like they’re in Indy’s shoes as opposed to just playing a ‘just press X’ Indiana Jones simulator.”

For Virant, Jones himself led the way during development of The Great Circle.

“It’s really good when you can play something and you have kind of a guiding light, some sort of constraint,” he says. “I found with Indy, for every mechanic I worked on in the game, it was like, okay, we have combat, but it feels too stiff. Why does it feel too stiff? Because there’s no humor in it. And so you can immediately start to knock those [questions] down.”

The Order of Giants gives Indiana Jones more to discover in Rome, the first location seen in The Great Circle. Returning to the iconic city for the setting of the DLC gives both new players and players who finished the original game even more history and context to explore.

“Rome and the Vatican feel like places built on secrets,” Derrick says. “They’re steeped in history, myth, and mystery, and many of the threads of The Great Circle, including the origins of the Nephilim, tie back to that part of the world. It felt like the perfect backdrop to introduce another great mystery for Indy to dive into.”

And while The Order of Giants might be the end of this particular adventure, that doesn’t mean players have seen the last of the famed archaeologist, Derrick teases.

“Indiana Jones is timeless, and I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished with The Great Circle. I have a strong feeling we haven’t seen the last of the man with the hat in video games, whatever form that may take.”

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: The Order of Giants is available now on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Game Pass, PC, and is coming to Nintendo Switch 2 in 2026.

Kelly Knox is the author of Star Wars Conversation Cards, Be More Obi-Wan, and Star Wars: Dad Jokes, and a co-author of the upcoming The Phantom Menace: A Visual Archive. Her puns are always intended.