Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (1999)
Indy has proven to be a natural fit for video games, his quippy mystery-solving persona perfect for LucasArts point-and-clicks and his whippy fascist-ass-beating persona perfect for MachineGames' The Great Circle. Infernal Machine sits somewhere in the middle of all that, and somewhere in the middle of the design trends of 1999. The N64 version, which I played, was released a year later in 2000.
Depending on how positively or negatively you want to describe Infernal Machine or whose attention you want to attract, you might call it an adventure game saddled with unfortunate action sequences, an action game saddled with unfortunate puzzle solving, a 3D evolution of early LucasArts adventures, an Indy-themed reskin of Ocarina of Time, a Tomb Raider-like, a licensed cash-grab–all of these are accurate enough.
In truth, it is a mashup of all of the above. (The mashup is felt all the harder because Indy himself is a mashup of pulp adventure heroes and had become a self-referential parody by 1999.) Infernal Machine is an "action-adventure" game, a nebulous genre that mostly means it features both combat and box-sliding puzzles and whatever game mechanics are marketable at the time. It is also an earnest shot at a real video game and, in retrospect, the kind of necessary stepping stone that would help bring video games into the next century.
In 1999, that meant it kind of played like Tomb Raider and kind of like Ocarina of Time, and it included numerous faux-cinematic flourishes (when Indy whip-swings over a pit, the game cuts to a cinematic angle and plays a fanfare of the Indy theme). The interface for the N64 port apes OOT directly, with a context-sensitive action button and three inventory slots assigned to C-buttons. This also reflects a Nintendo design ethos of the era, that game controllers should have one main button surrounded by utility buttons. Considering OOT’s popularity and prestige, it is easy to imagine why a designer would borrow its interface, but OOT’s interface was always one of its weakest points: navigating start menus to assign items to the C-buttons was tedious bullroar, and the same is true of Infernal Machine.
All the 3D movement and platforming in the game is awful, stuttery and imprecise, though generous checkpoints make deaths only minor setbacks. The deaths feel more like old-fashioned Sierra death screens (an irony given Indy’s gaming lineage). Watching Indy die in a variety of gruesome ways is part of the experience–there is clearly some mean-spirited fun in Indy falling into lava or getting squished by boulders. Players quickly learn to move cautiously through the game world.
Infernal Machine’s adventure game DNA is, to me, its most interesting feature, though perhaps for its failures more than successes. The bulk of the game is spent solving puzzles and searching for inventory items, and your progress is tracked by an “Indy Quotient,” a point value similar to the scores of early PC adventure games. One gets the impression that adventure-y stuff is what the game wants to be doing and everything else is market-mandated fluff. Infernal Machine was in fact directed by Hal Barwood, a LucasArts vet who also directed the point-and-click Fate of Atlantis.
The puzzle design is in my opinion poor, and it doesn’t help that many puzzles take longer than they should because you also have to haul Indy’s virtual corpse around the screen. Puzzles that include action elements are doubly tedious: solving a puzzle might require climbing multiple ladders and making a finicky jump and potentially doing it all over again if you failed to press a button or find an item elsewhere in the level. There is one particularly bad sequence where Indy has to find four items by navigating whitewater rapids on a raft. The raft controlled so poorly, and missing a turn or sinking your raft meant restarting the entire sequence, that I just about snapped my Steamdeck in half.
The genre mashup also makes some puzzle logic unclear. I struggled to solve one puzzle where Indy has to cut a rope holding up a bridge, creating a “ladder” into another area. On paper, this puzzle sounds intuitive, and it probably would have been in a traditional point-and-click. In game, however, the machete you use to cut the rope is categorized as a weapon, not an item. Most puzzles in the game are solved with a traditional “use item X on puzzle Y” interface, not equipping a weapon and pressing the “attack” button. In another level, and quite confusingly, an item is used as a weapon. The game is an illustration that genres are not antidotes to each other, that the solution to problems in adventure game design is not to insert action elements.
Despite all this, I am drawn to Infernal Machine, I think mostly because it is such a link in the video game evolutionary tree. It reflects the period when adventure games struggled to find their identity among 3D games and shifting market trends. It reflects the challenges designers faced in how characters ought to move and control and “feel” in 3D space. It reflected new challenges in interface design, in how players might interact with a variety of complex mechanics using one controller with only so many buttons. Infernal Machine makes sincere, if largely unsuccessful, attempts at solving these challenges. (I have not played the PC release but to my understanding it does not solve these problems either, just replaces an awkward gamepad with awkward keyboard controls.)
Infernal Machine is downstream, most obviously, of earlier LucasArts adventures. It is sharing space with games like Tomb Raider and Ocarina of Time. And it is upstream of games that would not exist without it. It is no surprise, for example, that the Uncharted series riffs on Indiana Jones, but more precisely it is an evolution of Infernal Machine. Uncharted takes vibes and aesthetics and also specific pieces of game design: Nathan Drake starts with minimal equipment and has to take down bad guys and steal their stuff to fight even stronger bad guys, and that’s exactly what Indy does in Infernal Machine. Nathan Drake helped popularize the notion of a hero who is constantly making little remarks and quips, which helps establish character and also lets the game hint and direct the player, and Indy does that here too.
Ultimately, though, it is hard to pitch this game to modern gamers. Despite its connection to the LucasArts Indy games, Infernal Machine is too burdened by sloppy 3D platforming to appeal to point-and-click enthusiasts. And it is simply not a good action game, nor a good dungeon crawler, nor a good Indy story. (The plot is a perfunctory retread of America’s ideological enemies trying to locate an ancient mystical weapon.) But to someone playing decades later, the game retains some fascination as a work in loud conversation with so many games before and after.
P.S. I am also charmed by the game’s total indifference to addressing the narrative problems inherent in Indiana Jones. As usual, Indy travels to historic sites across the globe, but there is little indication of historical research or authenticity (at least one voice actor does an “Asian” voice that is so bad it is hard to be offended). And if you wondered whether this game addresses the criticisms that Indy is a colonial interloper stealing artifacts from their native countries, it does not: any time Indy picks up a treasure, the game plays a “cha-ching!” sound effect. These treasures are converted into money that Indy can use to buy supplies, including weapons and ammo. The implication (if one cared to draw it but this game clearly does not) is that Indy is looting historical artifacts and giving the proceeds to arms dealers.