They did a great job making you feel like you were in an indiana jones game.
The tutorial is the shot-for-shot recreation of the opening of lost ark. golden statue/sandbag swap, "throw me the whip!", the whole thing. We go from there to Jones' college office where he's celebrating with Marcus Brody and he hears a crash in the artifact storage. We find a VERY large person stealing something, Jones gets knocked out, and the adventure kicks off.
It's hard to compare this to other games. You're sneaking and stealing stuff like tomb raider or far cry but it's not really like either. Nor is it uncharted. There ARE main quests, side quests, and collectibles aplenty. But there are no convenient minimap pings or big arrows. You can pick one quest to track at a time and that's it - no way to get all the icons on the map at once. And your map is your journal, which you sometimes can't read because your hat is blocking the sun. You really feel like an adventuring archaeologist; in making the game less convenient they make it bigger and more worth exploring. I will say I was a huge fan of this for the first 2/3 and was ready to quit and youtube the ending for the last 10%.
There's a lot of improvised weapon combat - you want to knock folks out while you're sneaking around, and sometimes the guitar or broom handle is just the ticket. Once you start to lose patience with the sneaking, you discover that you can pretty successfully just alert five guards and box them all down. Eventually I started just shooting in a defensible location, letting guards bring me new fully loaded weapons to as I ran out of ammo.
There are lots of collectibles, each class of which asks the player a question. "So you'll collect five things for this large reward - will you collect 35 things for a small one? Or 250 for none?" They do a nice job of rewarding you for looking around, but it felt punishing to try to search exhaustively for anything.
Many of the items I couldn't find were locked behind story beats I was procrastinating on, which was nice to realize once I figured it out but clashed with my initial reflexes. Some were sitting in plain sight but were pretty missable; I missed an important disguise in the first area that wasted a bunch of time.
The voice acting is incredible - the two who voice indiana and marcus do incredible impressions of Harrison Ford and what's his face. Music is used nicely - there's a cool sting when someone recognizes you in a disguise or when you've otherwise been spotted.
I'm really impressed by how much it felt like an Indiana Jones adventure ^TM. Zones were cool, story fit right into the canon, punching nazis is awesome.
4/5
(not going to NG+ or 100% it, pretty happy to put it down)
