It would not exactly be a stretch to say that modern PlayStation’s success as a game maker and a first party is built upon Uncharted. Naughty Dog’s seminal action adventure game series started out as a rather unassuming blend of the classic Tomb Raider games and the at the time new hotness Gears of War. The original game, Drake’s Fortune, while being a moderate sized critical and commercial success, at no point indicated what the series would go on to become. But of course, any fan of the franchise, or of PlayStation, knows how it went – with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Naughty Dog elevated its craft of cinematic storytelling blended with taut and tightly designed linear action adventure gameplay. The studio’s name became synonymous with PlayStation games, and other Sony studios started following in Naughty Dog’s wake. Eventually, Naughty Dog would bring its craft to perfection with the Last of Us games, building on everything that had worked in the Uncharted games to a polished sheen, and delivering some of the greatest titles in the history of the medium in the process. But for as great as the Last of Us games are – and I say this as someone who legitimately feels The Last of Us Part 2 is one of the greatest games of all time – they are also fundamentally very different in the mood, tone, and aesthetic they strike as compared to Uncharted. For all the similarities that the two franchises share, if you wanted that globetrotting, swashbuckling, treasure hunting adventure, filled with some great action set pieces, some great historical fiction, and maybe a supernatural twist or two? The Last of Us is very decidedly not it. Very few things are, as it turns out. Earlier, I mentioned Tomb Raider as an inspiration for Uncharted, and within the video games medium, at least, Tomb Raider absolutely is the best equivalent. And for what it’s worth, fans of Uncharted do have potentially three other games they might like a lot to check out in the new Tomb Raider trilogy, if they haven’t checked them out already. Those games rebooted the franchise, taking inspiration from Uncharted liberally (how the tables turn, and what have you). And while none of the new Tomb Raider games ever match Uncharted’s brilliance, they are still really good in their own right. If you want more games along those lines, they are well worth checking out. But those games themselves are old now, and the Tomb Raider franchise has itself been inactive in terms of new releases for almost as long as Uncharted has. Inherently, it’s not unreasonable to assume that if there was any Uncharted fan who wanted more games along those lines, the seven years that have passed since the release of the final game in the modern Tomb Raider trilogy have provided more than enough time for them to look into those games for their fix. So pointing to Tomb Raider hardly helps here. Where hope comes from for Uncharted fans in these cases ends up being a very, very unlikely game– in more ways than one. This month, Microsoft will release MachineGames’ fantastic Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PS5. The game, which launched in December last year for Xbox Series X/S and PC to great acclaim, is being brought over to the PS5 as part of Microsoft’s continued multiplatform publishing push. Admittedly, the idea of a Microsoft game acting as a stand in for a flagship PlayStation franchise is hilarious, as is the idea that Indiana Jones, the granddaddy of Uncharted and Tomb Raider to begin with, has come in with an eleventh hour win here- but the game’s quality speaks for itself. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a marvelous single player action adventure game that really hits the perfect tone and aesthetic, takes players to multiple locations around the world on a globetrotting treasure hunting story, has a great historical fiction infused central plot and mystery, and has some really strong storytelling- which, of course, is typical for MachineGames. They are obviously not perfect equivalents. Indiana Jones is largely a first person game, for starters, which creates a fundamental change to the flow of the moment to moment gameplay. It is also far less focused on combat than the Uncharted games. Naughty Dog’s franchise is, of course, so combat focused that it has given rise to a whole class of memes about how the series’ protagonist Nathan Drake is a mass murderer (and even led to the rise in awareness of ludonarrative dissonance, and what it may mean when it comes to video games). Anyone who has seen the Indiana Jones movies, of course, knows that that level of killing and violence isn’t exactly what the eponymous main character is known for. And so it makes sense that The Great Circle de-emphasizes action. Instead, the game is designed almost like an immersive sim. Rather than guiding players through linear areas interspersing light platforming and puzzle solving with heavy combat encounters, The Great Circle moves players into small sandbox style semi open areas, giving players objectives but mostly leaving it to them to figure out how to go about them. In other words, it almost plays like an immersive sim lite. In any area, in any part of the game, Indiana Jones will have to contend with a lot of armed opponents, but he will rarely be shooting them away in grand shootouts. Instead, The Great Circle emphasizes stealth and melee combat, it emphasizes puzzles, and it emphasizes exploration and discovery within its areas for players to figure out how to progress. This is a fundamentally different type of game than Uncharted in that sense. If you were in it purely for linear and high octane action packed gameplay, and the roller coaster style set pieces and combat encounters that Uncharted is known for, then little in The Great Circle would scratch that itch (though it does admittedly have some excellent set pieces). At the end of the day, it’s not really going for that sort of experience, so if that’s the sort of Uncharted-style game you’re looking for, your search for something new that fills that niche is sadly going to have to continue. However, for other fans, who primarily want Uncharted’s pulpy, high octane, swashbuckling tone, its globe trotting adventure stories blending fact and fiction, for those fans who want Uncharted’s vibes more than anything, The Great Circle is a fantastic pick, one that carves out a very comfortable place for itself in the pantheon that Naughty Dog and Uncharted had monopolized for the better part of two decades now. That’s an amazing feat, and hopefully, MachineGames gets the chance to build on that with the follow up to this game. As for Uncharted? Hopefully, a new one of those is on the horizon as well. Thankfully we have something great and new that has a lot of the same vibes– but MachineGames’ take on Indy is ultimately its own thing (which is arguably one of the reasons it’s so good, and doesn’t just suffer from a knock-off syndrome). It’s not the exact alchemy that led Uncharted to becoming one of the most beloved brands in the industry. When the next one of those is coming is anyone’s guess– in a couple of years, it will have been a whole ten years since the last time the franchise was active. Hopefully there’s a new release well before then. Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.