Essential Tips and Tricks – Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Guide

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is an Action Adventure game with a major focus on adventure, as you’ll be doing a lot of exploring, solving puzzles, and tracking down important notes and collectibles, but also punching the lights out of fascists and nazis who get in your way of solving some archaeological mysteries. We’ve broken down the most essential tips for exploration, stealth, combat, and more when playing the game.

Exploration is a huge part of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – even moreso than combat. After some early tutorials and arriving in the Vatican City, you’ll be ushered around to complete your main objectives, but you’re also free to run around and explore at your leisure. This means you can search around for photo ops, find Adventure Books to level Indy up, discover notes to earn adventure points, etc.

Side-quests are called Fieldwork in this game, and you won’t just find dozens of exclamation marks on your map to start them. To begin a Fieldwork quest, you’ll need to find some sort of note that unlocks it. For example, an early main story quest has you taking pictures of inscriptions scattered around the Vatican, of which you only need four. Once you turn in this quest, Antonio, the NPC who assigned it to you, will suggest that you find six more for him. And so, while the main quest will continue the story, this job gets added to your Fieldwork tab. Another not-so-obvious example is you might come across a seemingly random note. The note may mention that a child has been locked up for stealing artifacts. There might be more to the story, and thus, a Fieldwork is added to your journal for Indy to investigate.

Leveling is a bit different than what you might be used to compared to other games of this style. Indy will level by discovering and looting things in the world. First, Adventure Books are the key to powering up Indy. There’s no leveling system or skill trees. Instead, you’ll find an Adventure Book that, for example, lets you hit harder. To unlock this skill though, you’ll need to spend adventure points, money, or medicine bottles, which all come from exploring and looting everything you find in the world.

Once you have bought a camera, be sure to keep an eye out for the camera symbol on the top left of your screen. If you see it pop up, that means there is something to take a picture of, which will net you adventure points as a photo op!

While the big, bright open streets of the Vatican are nice to stroll around, you will often find yourself delving into dark crypts. You’ll get a lighter later on, but starting out, you’ll need to manage keeping a torch around. First off, make sure to light every brazier you find. Not only do they provide a source of light and a breadcrumb trail to track where you’ve been, but they can re-light any torches you find just in case you lose yours.

If you lose your torch, you can oftentimes find jars of unlit torches for you to grab, or sometimes you can find them on the walls.

Another big hurdle is that Indy will drop his torch when performing various actions. For example, if you need to swing over a gap or climb up on a ledge, once you extend the whip, he’ll drop the torch. To counter this, aim and throw your torch to where you’re headed. That way you can swing across or climb up, and then snag your torch off the ground.

You can throw your torch through gaps in walls, as well. An early puzzle you’ll find has you squeezing through a gap in the wall, only for water to extinguish your flame. When things like this happen, it’s very likely that the room has a window for you to toss your torch through. Furthermore, try to avoid using the torch to bash enemies, as it’ll break, and you’ll be without your light source. Instead, drop it and either use your fists, whip their weapon out of their hand, or just find something else lying around. Once the combat is over, pick up your torch.

Climbing takes stamina, so make sure Indy is rested before trying to make it up a big wall. Luckily, it only drains when you move, so you can always stop moving to rest and recover.

Give yourself an extra boost of stamina by eating a piece of fruit. Fruit will give you a bonus to your stamina, while bread gives you a bonus to your health.

White chalk, paint, and scuff marks is your cue on where you can traverse. If you see a ledge or a door covered with white chalk, that typically means you can climb or interact with it in some way.

You will occasionally come across lockboxes with either a lock or a combination. If it requires a combination, look for a nearby note or just something to interact with around the lock, as the code is typically nearby.

If you need to know where to go for your currently tracked quest, bring up your map. Not only will it show you on the map where to go, but it’ll also create a waypoint out in the world for you to follow. You can go into your exploration difficulty settings and set it to always show the waypoint if you’d like.

As previously mentioned, stealth is your friend in the Great Circle, as there aren’t a lot of reasons to fight. So let’s first go over a few ways to slink your way through the game.

Early on, enemy AI is fairly typical. An enemy will spot you, and if the circle above their head fills up, they’ll yell out and alert everyone around them. You can use this to your advantage by having them spot you and luring them around corners to knock them out.

You can also sneak up on enemies with a melee weapon in hand and knock them out that way as well. Just make sure to hide the body as other patrolling enemies can find it and will start screaming.

Indy has a lean function that is quite useful when peering around corners. As long as you have something in your hand, you can hold the left trigger and then click on the left or right stick to lean. This allows you to see around corners while remaining hidden.

If you do get busted in the city, either by doing something like cracking your whip too close to people, or hanging around near a guard who can see through your disguise, it’s best to run away and hide. It takes a while, but if you break the enemy’s line of sight, the flashing circle around your health bar will eventually stop pulsing, allowing you to once again become incognito.

Everything is a weapon in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. And when I say everything, I mean, most things. Littered around combat zones will be various one-handed and two-handed weapons for Indy to pick up and use. Improvised Weapons play a huge part in this game’s combat, so these tips will prove useful:

Anything you find can be thrown, be it to distract guards so you can sneak around, or heck, even to throw a hammer at a man’s face. But once you’re in smacking range, it’s never long before the item crumbles to dust. So always be on the lookout for things to pick up.

A few early disguises, like the Clerical Suit and the Blackshirt Uniform, come with a weapon in your satchel that never goes away. It can still break, but you can use a repair kit to fix it. Just know that repair kits are few and far between, and your weapon will break constantly, so use these sparingly to knock out a guard if there’s nothing else around.

Indy also carries his famous revolver. The revolver is deadly, but I’d recommend against using it much. Ammo is incredibly sparse, and shooting the gun will alert everyone within the vicinity. I’d say that you should only use it if you have no other option – everyone is already alerted, and you just need to quickly thin out the herd of enemies.

Combat in this game can be slapstick levels of fun, it’s all about using the environment to your advantage. You can dodge around while fighting, and parry to block and launch counterattacks at foes.

Early on, most of the fights will play out in the fashion of you whipping an enemy, which stuns them and makes them drop their weapon, only for you to then pick it up and use it against them. Again, you can throw your weapon at an enemy for a fun ranged attack, but unless they’re stunned, they’re really good at dodging them. Heck, if they’re on full alert, they can even catch the weapon.

The gamut of enemies early on ranges from scrawny little dudes to big muscle boys to even healers. For the scrawny dudes, just knock them out, they’re weak. For the muscle guys, they’ll block a lot of your attacks. Hold the attack button, which consumes a bar of stamina, to give them a hard thwack to break their guard. Then trade blows with them, mixing in dodges and parries.

Be mindful that everything you do costs stamina, so don’t just go crazy with your attacks and dodges. Running out of stamina will blur your screen and massively slow down your punches and dodges, and we don’t want that.

There are also healer enemies adorned with green crosses. These guys fight like a heavy and almost always drop a bandage when they’re taken out. And watch out, if you let them linger too long, they could resurrect one of your fallen enemies.