I wasn’t going to play the new Indiana Jones game on PlayStation 5, but after much encouragement from my wife, I did, and I’m glad.  Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was an excellent experience with a great story, and was a throwback to the kind of entertainment I think we need a lot more of.  I was skeptical of Lucasfilm doing anything with Indiana Jones these days under the ownership of Disney.  I like the character and the kind of science spawned from those movies over the years.  But I wasn’t sure if they could pull off a good story without George Lucas.  But my wife has been pressing me to play more video games with the grandchildren, because that’s what they like to do.  But my life is so busy, I don’t have time to hang out online like most video games require, with a very social experience.  These days, video games are a way for kids to interact socially.  Games like Fortnite and Call of Duty put you in contact with thousands of people daily.  Kids who play these games for hours will interact with thousands of people in real time, so video game playing these days is a very social experience, and I’m not at all crazy about that.  I talk to way too many people throughout the week to want to spend my downtime talking and playing with more people.  So I haven’t been playing video games very much, and my wife thinks I need to do more for stress management.   So I listened to her, wives can be good for many things, and when the new Indiana Jones game came out in April of 2025 on the PS5 console, I thought I’d try it. 

Because I’m a fan of the character and raised my kids on the optimism of those movies, as a baseline for other things, I bought the Collector’s Edition of the game, which came with all kinds of neat stuff.  But once I started playing the game, I enjoyed the story as it takes you through the character of Indiana Jones to Peru, the Vatican, Giza, the Himalayas, Thailand, Shanghai, and Iraq.  It’s not an online game, so you can play it without interacting with others and have a nice story-driven experience.  And much to my surprise, this game was very much in line with the Indiana Jones movies, and it had a tone similar to the most recent one, the Dial of Destiny.  So it was true to the original character and didn’t have the woke stuff, which is such a problem these days.  There were a few things, but not enough to tarnish the game.  It was a good adventure story that was much longer than a typical movie.  I spent 60 hours playing the game, with about 12 hours of that time just doing the story itself, so it turned out to be a long movie experience that took place for me during April 2025, which was a good break from all the other things I typically do.  And it was good for the grandkids to see me doing something besides reading books, as I’ve said before, I read 4 to 5 books a week.  Some weeks, more than that, so I cover a lot of content that is very personal.  You can’t share the content you read with your family very well because reading is such a private thing.  But ironically, there is a scholarly element to this Indiana Jones game that was very refreshing.  

The game itself is about the “giant” controversy, which I think is the most important in the world right now, the idea that an ancient race of giants who lived before Noah’s flood inhabited the earth and had a very advanced culture.  I read a lot about this evidence, and it was a surprise that the modern debate drove the game’s plot.  We live in a time when people ask tough questions, and authority figures in authority positions have been caught lying to us, right to our faces.  At the center of this Indiana Jones story are many problems that played out during the Second World War.  Playing the Indiana Jones character you get to deal with actual historic characters such as Bonito Mussolini and the obsession with the occult that the Nazis were investing in and when you put the biblical narrative of the Fallen Angels of God, the Nephilim at the heart of a massive modern conspiracy theory, you have all the contents of a fascinating story, and it was.  Because I read so much about many different topics, the story of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle felt like it was produced and made just for me, including all the items that came with the Collector’s Edition.  I spend a lot of time thinking about these things through books and online lectures.  So it was a pleasure to play a video game about that kind of storyline.  And to have the material compelling, educational, and entertaining.  The game makers really loved the story, and it showed.

They first announced this game in 2020 during the COVID-19 crisis.  I wanted to like the news, but I was so down on Disney and Lucasfilm for what they had done to Star Wars that I would have rather they just left Indiana Jones alone.  As a literary character in our culture, Indiana Jones does so many good things that I figured Disney would only damage that character, as they have so many other things they’ve mishandled.  For instance, the pressure seen on a recent Joe Rogan Podcast with the Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass probably wouldn’t have happened without an Indiana Jones character in popular, mainstream literature and filmmaking laying the foundation to apply the pressure.  So many people have been inspired by the character that they have correctly challenged established norms in a very healthy, academic way.  And when a game like this comes out and a mainstream audience plays it in such a mass way, good things tend to happen, and you see that with the questioning of independent investigators, questioning the institutional narrative of things to evoke the truth, which is what we should all be concerned about.  Stories like this light intellectual fires and usually have great significance for those who experience them.  So a game format, as opposed to a movie or a book, was very appropriate.  And I had a lot of fun with the game.  I’m glad I listened to my wife.  I like playing video games, but don’t think I’ll play them often.  But I am so happy to have taken the time to play this one, and it ended up being a positive thing for my entire family.  And I wish it could have gone on forever in many ways.  But playing through the whole story was an enjoyable experience that was a nice break from my day-to-day.  And I look forward to similar experiences to come along that kind of storytelling frontier.

Rich Hoffman

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