It's more than the sum of its parts, in ways I can't really explain. I spent a couple of hours on it today and I was just completely absorbed in it, in a way that doesn't happen often these days. I think it's mostly the environments - they're just incredibly well designed, intricate but easy to navigate with interesting things to find around every corner, and with a refreshing lack of radars or "Indy sight" or any gamey nonsense to take you out of the experience. (A subtle little indicator of where to go when you bring up your journal is about as far as it ever gets, and that's mostly just to stop you spinning around on the spot as you read your map). Even things like not being able to read your journal in the dark adds to the atmosphere.
Also the pacing is good. The side quests in particular are excellent and I wouldn't advise anyone to skip any of the big Fieldwork quests. They're long and detailed with their own areas to explore and they all feed back into the main story in interesting ways. It feels more of a piece than most games do.
In short, it's excellent, I don't know how you could call it alarmingly bland and average at all. Sure the licence helps but we've all played a lot of shit licensed games in the past, right? This is how it should be done.
I don’t even watch these things any more. No point getting excited over a CGI trailer for a game that’s years off that won’t look anything like that anyway. Nowadays I mostly just wait for stuff to come out and then judge whether it’s worth looking at by how excited everyone else is getting about it. I knew nothing about either Metaphor or Indiana Jones this year before they came out (I don’t think I’d even heard of Metaphor) and I think my experience was all the better for it.
I didn’t even realise there was a final decision to make. I just walked up one of the three paths they offered and clicked on the thing at the end. If it ever explained what I was choosing or what my options were, I missed it. I was surprised when the game abruptly ended.
I’ve played a bit more of Indy now and actually it’s excellent. It must have been a hell of a pitch when they went in and said “we’re going to make a game based on one of the most iconic and charismatic characters in movie history, and we’re going to make it first person so you only ever see him in cut scenes” but bloody hell does it work. They’ve made an incredibly atmospheric Indy game based around archaeology and fisticuffs and completely nailed it, it’s far better than just doing an Uncharted clone like everyone was surely expecting. It’s a little bit Dishonored, a little bit Hitman and I can’t wait to dig into it further.
I played the opening section and the glassy-eyed animatronic Indy was really off-putting, the characters are remarkably bad. He does sound right though.
Garwoofoo