Go back to Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine

Written by: Rik
Date posted: February 21, 2022

As regular readers may know, we’ve been doing a little series of retrospectives as part of this site’s 20th anniversary celebrations, in which we look back at some of our oldest reviews, and the games they covered, while also adding a new review of a related title.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that I finally got around to playing Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb, the 2003 follow-up to Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, which was among the first games I wrote about, in (it says here) the summer of 2002.

Looking back at something you wrote nearly 20 years ago is potentially fraught with danger, however much you might reassure yourself that the you of back then may have been a wally with a penchant for bad jokes but was unlikely to have written something downright offensive, still less something that has survived multiple checks and site moves over the years.

In this case, at least, I think we’re safe on that front, even if there are other egregious crimes against writing committed in the name of youth, confidence and sass contained within. I do however have a memory of a general backlash against the late-90s saturation of Tomb Raider (there was a game a year between 1996 and 2000) causing some to revert to fairly unpleasant and misogynistic comments about the ubiquity of its protagonist.

My own, brief, worry was of perpetrating the less directly obnoxious view that Tomb Raider was just a rip-off of Indiana Jones in the first place, with the arrival of The Infernal Machine signalling a return of its hero to take his crown from the pretender Ms Croft. When actually Tomb Raider was the game to do what it did first, with LucasArts belatedly stumbling onto the scene to shoehorn its famous archaeologist into a similar 3D adventure.

As it turns out, I didn’t quite do that. But it does look like I was desperate to avoid slagging off Tomb Raider, while admitting I never really played it much, yet remained confident enough to declare that it and The Infernal Machine probably weren’t all that similar, actually. It’s the kind of take you might see these days on social media, in which someone attempts to nuance their position to such an extent that they end up going full circle back around to stupid. [It’s possible you’re overthinking this – FFG Reader].

I hadn’t played much Tomb Raider then, and haven’t played any more since. But I reckon this is pretty similar stuff: Tomb Raider with a hat and whip. And what is this review even doing in the adventure section? There’s no continuity with the previous graphic adventures, not really (although Dr Sophia Hapgood does return from Fate of Atlantis). It’s an action adventure, dammit! Right, that’s it, I’m moving it over to Action.

I haven’t touched The Infernal Machine much either since I first wrote about it, except perhaps to grab a few screenshots at various points. I think it possibly had a period of not being sold very widely, and then being a bit fussy to get working on modern Windows (I played the GOG version this time around, with no issues, although I do still have my original discs).

Anyway, coming back to it now, especially immediately after playing The Emperor’s Tomb, it seems a little bit clunky and dated. That’s been a hazard throughout this anniversary series, to a certain extent. While comparing two related games can be quite good fun, it can also mess with your mind to play them concurrently, particularly when they’re two third-person action games filled with precision jumps and big deadly chasms with slightly different control schemes. Plus, if there’s such a thing as having a maximum capacity for accidentally plunging to your virtual death, then it was possibly exhausted during The Emperor’s Tomb, a game which, unlike its predecessor, does not have the luxury of a mid-level save.

That said, I’d say The Emperor’s Tomb is probably a better game overall, as well as being more representative of the Indiana Jones experience, factoring in a bit more story, a few more characters, and a lot more action. The fist-fighting mechanic, in particular, adds some much-needed oomph to the combat, which here is largely limited to some fairly comical gunplay. Plus, it has some pretty stirring music throughout, which conjures up a bit more movie magic.

That’s a 00s Xbox game, though, right down to the macho and occasionally seedy comments that its version of Indy makes throughout, while this is very much a late 90s Windows effort, with a dorkier, skinnier Indy. Even the save-anywhere system uses the Windows interface, saving your game like you would a Word document. Ditto the between-level ‘Trading Post’ interludes, in which you can exchange the jewels and bits of bonus treasure found throughout for additional health kits and ammo, which sort of call to mind the likes of Indiana Jones and his Desktop Adventures and Yoda Stories from a few years earlier.

The controls are also very ‘PC game’, in that there seems to be far too many of them, and I was left wondering what exactly had been lost in the transition to the much simpler Emperor’s Tomb setup. That said, this is a much more deliberate game in terms of controlling your movements: holding Shift to make sure you don’t drop off a ledge is particularly important. It’s also slightly fussy when it comes to how close you have to be to something to pick it up or use an object on it – yes, I fell to my death in the icy water while trying to find a suitable place to inflate the raft on the third level, thank you.

Speaking of which, it looks as if I misrepresented this part of the game in my review, with the implied high-stakes escape from a Soviet base being, upon reflection, more like a more considered paddle away from, then back to, a part of said base to pick up repair kits for your raft before returning to it again in order to try and collect various pieces of a puzzle from different areas of the surrounding waterway.

The other major thing I didn’t really mention before is just how far Indy seems able to jump in this game, making reptilian leaps over a huge distance to grab onto the nearest ledge. Which leads you to all kinds of unlikely attempts, some of which are indeed the right move and intended solution, some of which are not. The line between the two isn’t always as clear as it might be, and I have a dim and distant memory of trying to jump between a series of elevated columns at some point, figuring what I was trying to do was actually impossible, only for a walkthrough to confirm it was merely a matter of my imperfect execution.

And so I possibly understated the extent to which you can get stuck here, maybe because I was defensive about how crap I was and how much this kind of thing might also have been par for the course in Tomb Raider. As far as I recall, it took me ages to get through this game first time around, and only the extended periods of free time available to a student supposedly preparing for final year examinations afforded me the chance to do so. If my attempts this time around are anything to go by, I’m not sure I’d always have been quite so patient and persistent.

The Infernal Machine was released at a funny time for traditional adventures, in that they were largely being ditched for games like this, and so however much I might have tried to make a case for it being more representative of the mix of action and adventure in the films than the likes of Last Crusade and Fate of Atlantis (the latter of which I have sadly never played), the truth is that LucasArts made Indy point and clickers when they were popular and moved to a Tomb Raider clone when they were popular.

(All of which led me to dig up this old interview with Hal Barwood in PC Zone, during which Paul Presley tries – unsuccessfully – to make him feel regret about the decline of the old adventure.)

They were potentially late to the party with this, a contemporary of The Last Revelation, the fourth Tomb Raider game. By the time of The Emperor’s Tomb, development responsibilities had passed to a third party, The Collective (the book Rogue Leaders, about the history of LucasArts, provides some insight into development of The Infernal Machine but Emperor’s Tomb gets the briefest of mentions), and 2003’s instalment of Tomb Raider, Angel of Darkness, proceeded to tank the franchise and keep it out of sight for the next few years. It was pretty much the end for Indy, too, although there was a 2009 game, The Staff of Kings, which snuck onto the Wii and PS2 (but not PC) to little fanfare.

When it comes to The Infernal Machine, it seems likely that I might have overestimated it slightly at the time. It was one of those games that was reviewed relatively close to release, and I was possibly surprised by the extent to which I liked it, despite it seeming to share all of the same elements that had put me off Tomb Raider: precision jumping, puzzles that involves symbols, levers and traps, and wandering around aimlessly while lost and wondering what to do next.

As mentioned previously, I possibly would have persisted with a second playthrough for a little longer than the first few levels had I not just finished The Emperor’s Tomb. I still retain fond feelings towards this game, and perhaps one day I will play a Tomb Raider, too, and enjoy that. But perhaps when it comes to it, I’m likely to commit yet another retro-crime by skipping the first few, rather than diving in right at the start.