Lightfall is upon us, inevitable server issues notwithstanding, and while waiting for Destiny 2 to occupy my days once more, I’ve used the last week to replay an unsung gem of the late 90s: Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. Unfairly maligned in its day for not being an adventure like Fate of Atlantis, it is nonetheless a great game that showed that developers at Lucasarts weren’t content with any old licensed drivel. And to be honest, I could spend days just gushing over the environments.
The old Tomb Raider, celebrated as it may have been, I’ve always found drab and lifeless. Okay, maybe lifeless is right, you were raiding tombs after all. But surely Lara Croft herself would get tired of the same old brown and grey eventually. The sequels would introduce a bit more color and variation, but ultimately the palette always strived for a sort of realism, well, as realistic as you could get with people transformed into dragons by old daggers anyway. Venice (despite completing TR1, that was as far as I could get in TR2 before giving up) wasn’t a carnival of 256 colors, it was about what you’d expect from old stone and bricks.
However, Indiana Jones famously doesn’t believe in the supernatural, hence he’s not bound by such wild concepts as realism. And it shows in the colors of the places he visits throughout his adventure. Lava is a searing reddish hue, and the vapors are as ambient temperature as you’d expect from a Hollywood-inspired videogame. Sand is not vaguely beige, but a most brilliant mix of yellow and orange. Water is not just transparent like in real life, but a torrent of azure. With colors like these, who needs realism?
The Infernal Machine was mockingly called a Tomb Raider clone back then. Perhaps it is so, though I’d argue that Lara Croft was directly inspired by Indy, so it’s merely a full circle. You gotta wonder where the circle goes now, since the new Tomb Raider has been inspired by Uncharted instead… what will the upcoming Indiana Jones game do this time? Clone Uncharted as well? It might, and perhaps it won’t be so bad.
Clones have always had a bad reputation in games. Remember the “Doom clones” of its era? Following a leader denotes a lack of originality on your own part, or so goes the idea. But some of the best games around have been directly inspired by other, perhaps more famous titles. I’ve already said that I think Infernal Machine is better than the Tomb Raider games it so obviously copied, but there are so many other cases where a clone can stand perfectly well on its own. Resident Evil is sci-fi Alone in the Dark with zombies. Serious Sam is Doom with more enemies and an adventure setting.
The idea, I guess, is that a clone will need to have at least some element of differentiation, and so will usually introduce a gimmick. When we are lucky, this one different element is what wins the day. Unfortunately the rise of mobile gaming seems to have given birth to an entirely different idea of clone, one where games are exactly always the same. There is only so much you can do with the match-3 formula, I guess.
Even if the new Indiana Jones game ends up being another riff on Uncharted, I have faith that it could stand well on its own. Sometimes, as Henry Jones said, you must believe.
A Few Steps 