Game review: Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (1989)

Studio: LucasArts
Designer(s): Ron Gilbert / Noah Falstein / David Fox
Part of series: Indiana Jones
Release: July 1989 (DOS) / 1990 (FM Towns)
St. George’s Games: Complete playthrough (2 hours 22 mins.)

Basic Overview

It is amusing to recollect that when I played my first LucasArts games in the late 1980s / early 1990s — Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Loom, etc. — in the still-isolated climate of late Soviet / early post-Soviet Russia, I did not even have a very good understanding of what the «Lucas» in «LucasArts» stood for. I did know about Star Wars, and that some guy called George Lucas was responsible for their creation, but somehow it never came across my mind to associate the two — because, let’s face it, how could there ever be a connection between a saber-blasting, epic, starry-eyed space soap opera and a sarcastic, parodic, post-modernist game of rescuing your teenage girlfriend from the lab of a brain-sucking mad scientist, guarded by a couple of talking tentacles? Those guys might as well have named themselves after Baron Lucas of Crudwell, for all I know.

Amusingly, the first Star Wars-themed LucasArts game did not come out until 1993 — when property rights to the franchise were restored to the company from Broderbund — and even then it was just a flight simulator (Star Wars: X-Wing); the regular LucasArts adventure game team never got a chance to make a proper Star Wars game in its lifetime. (According to Noah Falstein, one of the team’s key designers, it was actually a good thing — had the team had access to Star Wars from the very beginning, they would have probably ended up baking Star Wars games and nothing but Star Wars games for the rest of their lives). Instead, after cutting their teeth on making a video game adaptation of Labyrinth back in 1986, they preferred to focus on original concepts and stories — much to the benefit of humanity — and the only other time «classic LucasArts» made a stab at adapting an actual movie to the video game medium was in 1989, when some marketing genius had the idea that it might be profitable to accompany the upcoming release of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, the third and — at the time — supposedly last movie in the Indiana Jones franchise, with a full-fledged video game. After all, the previous two movies came out too early for the digital entertainment industry to catch up with them, and they did own the rights this time.

To be accurate, LucasArts released not one, but two games based on the same movie: in addition to the adventure game, there was also The Action Game, a fairly generic platformer that absolutely no one remembers these days (other than YouTube, that is). But while the practice of making action/arcade games based on movies existed long before 1989, the art of turning movies into adventure games was still in its infancy — come to think of it, with the decline of adventure game studios at the turn of the millennium it pretty much got frozen in its infancy, which is a bit of a pity. I mean, if we are so very well used to studios and directors adapting books to movies (not always, but often resulting in people remembering movies much better than the books they were based on), what could be fundamentally wrong about adapting movies to adventure games (as in, actually adapting movies rather than using the movie universe to create new plotlines)?

The designers of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade: The Adventure Game had to find that out the hard way. Their only precedent, in addition to the already mentioned Labyrinth (where the bizarrely schizophrenic nature of the movie itself already made life easier for the adapters), was Sierra On-Line’s The Black Cauldron from a few years earlier — a game specifically designed for kids rather than grown-ups, since putting yourself in the shoes of Assistant Pig-Keeper Taran and faithfully performing all of his tasks in the Disney movie was deemed a «non-challenge» more suitable for impressionable children than soon-to-be-bored adults. The Black Cauldron did have one interesting redeeming feature, though: while playing the game, you could occasionally choose between alternate paths, deviating from the straightforward event timeline of the movie and taking the game into slightly different directions, even as far as opting for a more tragic ending. This was the key feature that made all the difference. If the main point of playing (an obviously visually inferior) video game adaptation of the movie was in the possibility of you, the player, becoming the movie’s protagonist, why should you be stopped from changing the linear plot of the movie and taking it somewhere else instead, according to your own desires? In an almost paradoxical development, The Black Cauldron — a game supposedly expected to loyally mimick the linear plot of a «fixed» movie — ended up being much less linear than most of Sierra’s «original» titles of its time.

The same logic would be adapted to Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, and for the guys at LucasArts it would, in fact, be a bit easier since they — from the very start, when your way of beating Maniac Mansion would significantly depend on the characters you picked at the beginning of the game — already had quite a bit of experience with branching, non-linear narrative in their early games. On the whole, the game would follow the movie plot fairly closely, but every once in a while you could make a choice, ditching the original plot and opting for some other solution (sometimes an actually more logical one than what was offered in the movie) — right up to the very end, where you could totally transform the final mood of the experience in the opposite directions of the emotional spectrum.

It is debatable, of course, if the solid sales figures of the game back in 1989 (250,000 copies sold, according to Noah Falstein’s memories — a pretty huge number for the time, provided it is correct) were primarily due to this design feature (I mean, it was not even advertised on the back cover of the box — the most enticing sales pitch you got was Visit dozens of locations you never saw in the movie!, which is not even totally true), or merely to the fact that all the 1989 teenagers who saw the movie and owned a computer had no choice but to go and buy the game. More than thirty years later, though, who really cares? In this day and age, when the success of Bethesda’s Indiana Jones And The Great Circle (2024) shows that demand for the good old Indy and his whip remains as strong as it has ever been, all that matters if the original game that started it all is even worth revisiting in the first place — or has nothing but limited museum value for the people of my own generation. Personal bias aside, this is what we’re going to try to decide in the main bulk of the review.

Content evaluation

Plotline

I suppose that discussing the plot of The Last Crusade as an adventure game would be a ridiculous enterprise without referencing it as a movie — although, ironically, as a game this story remains immune to the most common criticism that one finds adressed to it as a movie: namely, that the final film of the Indiana Jones trilogy was way too keen on reminding us all about its formulaic nature. After all, Temple Of Doom was hailed upon release as a somewhat darker and more disturbing angle on the Indiana Jones trope, making a lot of substantial and stylistic departures from Raiders Of The Lost Ark; in contrast, The Last Crusade brought back the Nazis, the Judeo-Christian McGuffin, and the round-the-world touristic angle — all of that same-old-same-old in exchange for Indy’s daddy issues with Sean Connery as the only relatively «fresh» element. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed the movie in spite of its defiant lack of originality — I mean, "he chose poorly" and all that — but it was a little unfortunate that the final element of the trilogy could not grab on to a distinct identity all its own (and don’t even get me started on the lamentable cash grabs with the aging Ford in the 21st century).

The game, however, had no such issues: Lost Ark and Temple Of Doom both came out too early to be transposed to adventure game format, so for designers and players alike, The Last Crusade constituted a fresh and exciting challenge (though I do wonder, of course, if there ever was even a single player who would happen to play the game without seeing the movie — that would have been one really odd darkroom computer geek for 1989). An additional advantage was that Ron Gilbert, Noah Falstein, and David Fox — the veteran writers for LucasArts — were apparently provided access to the original script of the movie, and were working off it rather than the finished film, which omitted significant chunks of the initial plot: for instance, the game begins with a boxing match between Indiana and a contender at Barnett College that was allegedly in the script, but ultimately sacrificed. Of course, vice versa, not everything that is in the movie could make it into the game, either (the wild tank chase sequence in the desert, for instance, was completely ignored).

Overall, the plot of the game does stick to the plot of the movie fairly closely: this is one of those rare cases when, for obvious reasons, the designers were strictly prohibited from letting their imagination run wild. While I don’t find much use in a detailed direct comparison, I did rewatch the movie fairly recently and I believe the dialog in the game more than often matches it word-for-word — "you have your father’s eyes... and my mother’s ears", "don’t call me Junior" and all those other memorable bits. From the catacombs of Venice to Brunwald Castle to the Zeppelin ride to the Holy Land, all the locations are faithfully represented, and most of the movie’s characters make their dutiful appearance (with the notable exception of John Rhys-Davies’ Sallah, as the final part of the script had to be seriously abbreviated for technical reasons). You can even travel to Berlin to get the Grail Diary signed by Hitler if you so desire... though that part is actually optional.

The real challenge, however, was not in simply adapting Jeffery Boam’s script to the video game medium, but in designing various minor (or not so minor) choice-based alternate paths that would still allow the player to deviate from the linear course of the movie. Tiny bifurcating options appear already at the very beginning of the game — for instance, there is a more cunning way to escape the crowd of students at Barnett College than simply climbing out the window, as it happens in the film — and more will make their presence all through the remainder of the game. Sometimes it will simply be a matter of choosing the aggressive way out over the witty one (see more on that in the next section), but occasionally you shall have the (dubious) satisfaction of being able to handle things in a generally more clever manner than the movie heroes did, for instance, not letting the Grail Diary fall into German hands at all (though, as mentioned above, this shall deprive you of a pleasant detour to Berlin for a personal encounter with the Führer).

The most important way in which you can bend the future to your will is, of course, at the end of the game, where, depending on your actions, you can influence the «canon» outcome of the movie toward a more positive end (spoiler: Elsa lives) or a more negative one (spoiler: Indy dies). However, as cool as such warpings of reality might have seemed in 1989, this was more or less the same thing that Sierra had already done with The Black Cauldron, so no extra points for originality here (although the Indy-dies ending does give the writers the opportunity to throw in an additional joke).

There is hardly anything to add here unless we really want to turn to a full-fledged evaluation of Boam’s script for the movie, but I do feel like it needs to be spelled out explicitly that the overall feel of the plot is nowhere near the respective feel of the film — everything here is far more cartoonish, and not just because of the graphics, but also, I believe, because of the people. You may try to adapt anything, from Shakespeare to Hemingway, but as long as your team is run by the likes of Ron Gilbert, it is all going to look goofy and ironic. Not that the Indiana Jones movies ever really promised anything beyond top-level cornball entertainment, but they were movies about the battle between good and evil, after all, with their own morality lessons and everything. In the world of LucasArts games, however, there is no place for morality lessons (or family drama, for that matter); and although the game does not properly descend into parody, the emphasis is always on lightweight thrill, sarcastic humor, and egregious hyperbole more than anything else. So those who ask themselves the question «why would I be interested in playing a game that mainly just follows the plot of a movie I already know by heart?» should keep in mind that none of this is really about the plot as such — it’s about goofy challenges in awkward situations.

Puzzles

Released at an era by which the «perfect LucasArts formula» had not yet been polished to perfection, The Last Crusade introduced a couple experiments of its own — experiments that, legacy-wise, would linger on for the second title in the franchise but would not be adopted for any other LucasArts games. The less prominent (and altogether avoidable) new feature was the presence of action sequences — in fact, that is precisely how you begin the game, when you are invited to take place in a boxing match on campus. The fighting mechanics of the game are simple (block, parry, counter-punch, the usual stuff) but not trivial, as you cannot get away with simply mashing the punch button (especially when enemies start getting tougher and smarter); however, regular action games were more intelligent and fun than this already in 1989, and there are few things a veteran adventure gamer hates more than being caught up in an annoying action sequence when his mind has already been set on puzzle-solving. I suppose that there was really no way out of this, though — this is an Indiana Jones game, and getting through an entire Indiana Jones adventure without your protagonist throwing a single punch is like... well, like getting through an entire James Bond game only the game is Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?

Fortunately for the player (though unfortunate if the player is not aware of this), I believe you can get through the game without throwing a single punch (well, other than maybe one or two inavoidable fights where you can still use your intellect to soften up your opponent beforehand). However, if you do, you will be missing the gist of the title’s second big innovation: the score system. Yes, that’s right: the two-game mini-franchise of Indiana Jones is the only LucasArts series to ever feature a numeric marking of your progress, cheekily called «The IQ Score» (where IQ = «Indy Quotient») and requiring you to perform a set of actions in the most efficient way possible. (Apparently, the precedent for this had already been set way back in 1984 with Indiana Jones And The Lost Kingdom, a platformer title from Mindscape, Inc. which featured the Indiana Jones Quotient, so the LucasArts guys decided to honor that tradition).

The maximum IQ score cannot be obtained in one playthrough, though, because points are awarded for different solutions to problems — as in punching your way out vs. thinking your way out — and so the game keeps track of your «Episode» score (single playthrough) and «Series» score (results accumulated over different runs), inviting you to replay it further and further for extra confidence boost. Sometimes you even have to choose lethal options to fill up the Quotient — like punching Hitler in the face and then patiently restoring the game — as the Indiana Jones universe wants you to explore every nook and cranny to earn your just rewards.

As it was with Sierra games, where beating the game point-perfectly was always exponentially harder than just beating the game, it is dazzlingly tough to fill up the Indy-meter to the brim. Sometimes it’s just a matter of finding the right solution that is also the only solution, but every once in a while it is a matter, for instance, of finding the most efficient way of navigating a dialog tree without making a single mistake — if you do make one, you complete the task anyway but you will miss a few of those precious points. And, of course, you’ll have to defeat all of your rough opponents with fisticuffs sooner or later; no backing out this time even out of the toughest fights.

The strategy did not work, however, because it was somewhat half-assed. For one thing, tying the option of getting the highest score to the necessity of multiple playthroughs is a psychologically bad decision — no matter how good the game is, beating it takes time and effort, wearing you down, and to learn at the end of the game that now you have to do it once (or twice? thrice? who really knows?) more if you want to prove you’re a real man can be quite discouraging. Sierra never did that kind of stuff for a reason — even in Gold Rush!, the different paths were aligned so that you could get points for performing different actions, but in the end it would all even out to the same perfect score, if you truly did everything.

For another thing, the «IQ Score» was never shown on screen while you were playing; unless you carefully read the manual before starting the game, you might not even have realized that you were playing for a score until the very end. Sure, you could press a special button at any time and see your current progress, but the game never specifically notified you when you did something right — again, in stark contrast to Sierra, most of whose games had the score meter running in plain sight in the top right corner of the screen. This was an even more detrimental decision, because, for all purposes, it gave a hint that the «IQ Score» did not really matter. What mattered was just playing the game, having fun, and getting through all the challenges in the most natural way that came to you. So in that case, why bother with a score system at all?

In short, I prefer to believe that the annoying fighting sequences were really put there so that the crafty player could find an intelligent way to avoid all of them, and that the "IQ" system was intentionally sabotaged by those of the designers who thought it ignominious to surrender their sacred values to the Sierra way of doing things. If I am wrong about this, both these things are a taint on the game’s reputation; if not, we can just forgive them and move along.

The regular puzzles in the game are more or less typical for any LucasArts game from that period, though, of course, they all take in mind the specifics of the Indiana Jones genre — much time is spent figuring out how to work all sorts of tricky mechanisms in secret hideouts, with occasional mini-brainstorms with which the «Grail Diary» offers some assistance; and, of course, it would not be true Indiana Jones if you did not have to rely on your trusty bullwhip from time to time. None of those puzzles strike me as particularly memorable or interesting, but they are not altogether frustrating, either.

Two more things stand out, though. First is a radically new approach to dialog in the game — in fact, The Last Crusade is LucasArts’ first ever successful experience in introducing a proper dialog tree, where the choices that you make do not simply have a cosmetic effect but actually influence the story. As I have already mentioned, careful and thoughtful navigation of the choices you are given can result in Indy employing alternate solutions to puzzle-solving, receiving useful clues that can later be used, for instance, to solve a particular conflict without violence (or simply to improve your score). This is all the more ironic considering that this was also their first proper game based upon a rigidly linear movie scenario — one that would seem to preclude the idea of «choice» by definition.

And that is where the second thing comes in: having to introduce complex puzzles actually adds depth to the story. In the movie, for instance, you spend about 15-20 minutes or so inside Castle Brunwald; in the game, which gives you a mini-maze populated with Nazi guards of different stature and caliber (each of them possessing his own individual parameters), you can get stuck for several hours, trying on different disguises, exploring the best way to approach each single Nazi and gradually working out the optimal scenario to reach Henry and secure his freedom. There’s a melange of dialog-based puzzles, inventory puzzles and (mostly optional) fistfights that, if it were ever implemented in the movie, would have swollen the episode to three or four times its length — except it could not even theoretically be implemented in the movie, as the puzzles follow their own «adventure game logic» and implementing them would have turned the movie into Monty Python. (I would sure love to see Indy trying to peddle a bunch of «fine leather jackets» to a Nazi guard in the movie, though).

Puzzle-wise, I think the Castle Brunwald sequence marks the high point in the game and is quite an outstanding example of LucasArts game-making in general; it balances just the right amount of complexity and simplicity for such a scenario in 1989, it offers tons of replayability, and it makes you laugh even when you’re hopelessly stuck. A somewhat similar approach is also adopted for the Zeppelin scene, but that one suffers from being more focused on the nimble-fingers aspect (you have to navigate a maze while avoiding the Nazi guards — this time, there is no smooth-talking them with any of your Jedi tricks, it’s mostly just flee or fight either way). The catacomb and Temple scenes, on the other hand, I do not find nearly as exciting: for one thing, pulling cranks and solving chess-style puzzles is not my favorite pastime, for another, they’re fairly short and generally offer fewer thrills than the movie, not more. (But, of course, you do get the challenge of picking out the proper Grail — and seeing what happens if you choose poorly all by yourself).

Ultimately, I guess the most important thing to say here is that being familiar with the movie only very slightly improves your puzzle-solving chances against those players who are not, which is probably the highest compliment with which one can reward an adventure game based on a popular movie. At the same time, most of the actual innovations in puzzle design employed in the game were either dead ends (like the score system), or would be implemented with more satisfaction in subsequent titles (even the dialog trees). But the sequence inside Castle Brunwald, I believe, should indeed be framed and taught in any video game designer school as a near-perfect example of adventure game strategy (provided, of course, that there are still enough people left in the 21st century to understand what «adventure game strategy» really means).

Atmosphere

Note: this image, when used as a nice little thumbnail for an episode of my playthrough on YouTube, got me an automated strike for “hate speech” (!). Crawler bots are simple people: they see swastika, they unleash the fury.

«Psychological immersion» is not typically a major forte of LucasArts games, which have largely gotten by on the strength of their sheer humor and whackiness rather than painstaking world-building — Loom was an obvious exception, but that just might be one of the reasons why, being such an atypical entry in the studio’s line of work, it has become more of a cult fixture than a generally fondly remembered favorite. So when it came to making a game based on the Indiana Jones universe, the LucasArts boys found themselves facing a particularly touch challenge... which they kind of tackled with all the subtlety of Indiana Jones himself tackling the scary sword guy in the Egyptian bazaar, if you remember the actual moment.

The atmosphere of the original movie trilogy was perfectly crafted from four equally important components — Scenery, Action, Horror, and Humor. No single detail was particularly profound or particularly unpredictable, but the balanced mix of all four elements worked like nothing ever before seen in the history of cinema, which explains the movies’ tremendous commercial success as well as their enduring status through the years. How could a computer game properly compete with that? The graphic scenery, given the limited potential of late-Eighties’ pixel art, could hardly compete with Spielberg’s cinematography. Action was generally out of question, since this was an adventure game. Horror was not an option, since the game was to be marketable for children, and besides, horror in video games really only works when there’s an actual threat to the player (which is why occasional horror elements worked well in a game like King’s Quest IV), but LucasArts, with their commitment to the philosophy of as few dead ends as possible, could not allow themselves to design a game in which death would constantly nibble at the protagonist’s toes — even if, admittedly, there are more opportunities for Indiana Jones to kick the bucket in this game than similar chances of the protagonist dying in the majority of LucasArts games combined.

Ultimately, this leaves us with Humor — the bread and butter of all LucasArts productions anyway — and this is indeed the sole atmospheric backbone of the entire game. In the opening sequence itself, we see Indy proudly strutting across the corridors of Barnett College to present the «Cross of Coronado» to his friend Marcus... except that, for some reason, he’s soaking wet, prompting a quick baffled exchange between Marcus and his colleague: «Indy! Why are you all wet?» – «Don’t ask!» I know, I know, it’s not all that funny (it gets a bit funnier later when it becomes a running gag), but it quickly sets the right tone for the game, reassuring all the fans of Maniac Mansion and Zac McKracken that their favorite studio is not about to change tonality just to pay its respects to Steven Spielberg.

Unfortunately, since the designers still find themselves in the tight grip of the movie plot, that humorous tonality has to be restricted to little bumps and niches which disrupt the general flow of events. Sometimes it almost feels as if Gilbert and co. were sneaking their little jokes in, burying them in spots unlikely to be discovered by Spielberg or Lucas themselves, were they to unexpectedly wander inside the studio at any time (no such luck, apparently). Inside Barnett College, for instance, there is a notice board which, if clicked repeatedly, starts revealing satiric announcements like "FOR SALE: 6000 rats, 500 snakes. Call S. Spielberg". Later on, the library in Venice is covered in pseudo-quotes such as "It’s just capital how this building refuses to wither away — K. Marx", "The biology section is primitive now, but every day it grows more fit — C. Darwin", or, a possible favorite of any diligent student of Latin, "I love the military books here, but they had the gall to divide them into three parts — J. Caesar". You can easily miss any of those, or nonchalantly whisk them away as if they were just annoyingly distracting you from beating the game, but how else would LucasArts actually leave its stamp on the game?

Castle Brunwald is arguably the most transformed location of them all: what was, in the movie, an important, but relatively brief episode, mixing dramatics, action, and slapstick in equal measures, in the game becomes a convoluted maze where you are forced to interact with numerous Nazi guards as if they were typical occupants of Dr. Fred’s mansion — one of them has to be placated with the line "Soldier! Your pants are wrinkled!", while another might fall for the classic bait line of "I’m selling these fine leather jackets" (later to be turned into a running gag in the Monkey Island series, where many a puzzled Guybrush Threepwood fan probably spent a lot of time wondering where the expression came from, considering that poor Guybrush has never worn a leather jacket in his life). Nazi guards acting in accordance with and responding to the perks of LucasArts logic might just be the most memorable component of the entire game — far more exciting, in my opinion, than the largely NPC-free sequences in the catacombs of Venice or inside the Grail Temple itself.

The bad news is that there were some things in the movie that could never be properly presented from a humorous angle (unless we’re talking crude, straightforward Leslie Nielsen-type parody, which is not what LucasArts were ever about), and most of them had to be left in for the plot — the Elsa romance / betrayal, for one, and, of course, the final events in the Temple with the Grail denouement. And these events, alas, have none of their dramatic aura in the game — not even so much because of the technical limitations as for the reaason that, had Gilbert and co. tried to make things more serious in these moments, this would have clashed with the overall absurdist tone of the rest of the game. In the end, The Last Crusade remains a conflicted experience: emotion-wise, it works best in those moments when it deviates the most from the movie, and feels pretty dull and flat precisely in those moments when it loyally follows the script. Well, I guess pretty much the same would have happened if you ever charged the Marx Brothers with the task of adapting Shakespeare to the movie screen, no?

Technical features

Graphics

Like most other LucasArts titles that were released around 1989–1991, The Last Crusade exists in two main incarnations — the early 16-color EGA version, originally released in floppy disc format for DOS and Amiga, and the later 256-color VGA one, coming on CD to the FM Towns computer platform. Naturally, the latter version is the one you’ll want to get running on today’s emulators, although watching back-to-back snippets on YouTube does bring out a special charm to the EGA variant with its bright, almost dazzling colors, while the VGA-redrawn backgrounds can seem a bit more brownish and dusky in comparison. In the long run, though, both versions are fairly standard samples of late 1980s’ LucasArts pixel art, and I don’t particularly see people gushing over them the same way they might admire the comparatively more exquisite pixel art of, say, Loom — where graphic art was an essential part of the overall world-building process.

This is not to say that the graphics team just spent most of the time/budget sitting on their asses — after all, the very nature of the game suggested the challenging challenge of, if not matching the inspiring visuals of the movie, then at least somehow living up to its standards. To that end, what impresses the most is perhaps not the beauty of the pixel art, but its detailed nature: for instance, the space in front of Indiana’s office, the way it was in the movie, is jam-packed with dozens of students, each of them waving their hands and papers in the air — not a single image screen produced by LucasArts up to that point was that animated. Right next to this pandemonium, Indy’s office itself is expectedly cluttered with all sort of archaeological junk, lovingly and painstakingly arranged around the screen with just the right amount of humorous LucasArts seasoning (hey, is that Sam & Max stacked up in the left-side corner?). The library in Venice, the kitchen in Castle Brunwald (I don’t seem to remember a roasted boar in the movie, but it sure adds a lot of flavor in the game), the sumptuous dining room inside the Zeppelin — one could never accuse the artists of slacking. On an odd note, the «mystical» parts of the game — Indy in the catacombs, Indy in the Grail Temple — seem a bit sparse in comparison to the luxurious realms of civilization(s); the Grail Temple, in particular, seems graphically (and not just graphically) rushed, insufficient to provide a convincing backdrop to a convincingly epic finale.

Strange enough, although there are a few «cutscenes» sprinkled throughout the game here and there, the art has next to no close-up depictions of characters — I think that a single visual of the dead knight in his tomb in the catacombs is the only exception in the main part of the game, and then there’s a terrifying visual of Indy’s fate if you happen to «choose poorly» at the end of the game (ironically, Donovan himself is finished off off-screen, unlike in the movie). The latter is carried off quite splendidly and must have terrified many a poor kid back in their time, so it’s kinda puzzling why we never got to see what Dr. Jones Senior or the beautiful Elsa really looked like in this pixellated alternative to the movie universe.

Sound

At least in this department, the LucasArts team had nothing to fear — for the completed version of the game, they had access to John Williams’ actual score for the movie, and players with advanced sound cards or Roland synthesizers had the full pleasure of enjoying the glorious Indiana Jones theme as well as selected entries from the Last Crusade soundtrack itself, occasionally complemented by short bits and pieces of new music composed by Eric Hammond. Not that it’s always a blessing: for instance, you will most likely spend a lot of time inside the corridors of Castle Brunwald even if you’re playing with a hint book or walkthrough — and all of that time, you will be accompanied by the bombastic orchestral theme of the Castle, looping every 3 minutes or so. (There are certain portions of the game where there is no accompanying sound at all, but, unfortunately, Castle Brunwald is not one of those portions).

I do have to say that borrowing pieces of Williams’ soundtrack wholesale was not necessarily the right tactic — the music matches the epic, action-packed pace of the movie, but not so much the humorous, puzzle-centered slow pace of the game. In my mind, the right strategy would have been to reserve Williams’ music for the intro / outro bits and the action sequences, e.g. Indy fighting Nazis, piloting the stolen plane, braving obstacles in the Temple, etc., while the rest of the game could benefit from a quirkier, whimsier approach à la Monkey Island. As it is, there is occasionally an odd disconnect between the epic sound waves and the absurdist plot sequences. Then again, let us not nitpick; the main problem of the game’s soundtrack is that the number of John Williams’ compositions is quite small, and that Eric Hammond is no John Williams when it comes to filling in the gaps. Nor could I say anything useful about the sound effects and general sonic ambience (no better or worse than in any contemporary action game for PC) — and, unfortunately, the game came out a couple years early to feature any voice acting, even despite the final version shipped on CD-ROM. So let’s just get on with the show.

Interface

The game uses more or less the standard interface for that particular era of LucasArts: a list of a dozen verbs at the bottom of the screen, selectable with the mouse and combinable with hotspots on the main screen or inventory items from the bottom of the same menu. As usual, some of the commands are almost completely superfluous (e.g. "Turn on" and "Turn off" are generally the same as "Push" or "Pull"), and the hotspots only get revealed by dragging the mouse over the screen, for better or for worse. Nothing too enlightening.

With Indy’s ability to fist-fight his way out of different situations, though, this is the first time in a LucasArts adventure game where the interface occasionally goes into arcade mode — the punching game, while fairly simple on the whole, takes some cues from contemporary beat-’em up titles, and mindless swinging will only get you so far with the weakest opponents; to defeat the toughest ones, you really need to work on your arcade reflexes, which can be quite a drag for adventure game lovers. Fortunately, as I already mentioned, most or all of the fist-fights are optional (but do have to be completed if your goal is to reach the highest «Indy score» possible). The problem is that combat is fairly fast, your pixelated enemies’ moves are not easy to read, and the retrospective fun quotient of these sequences is quite low.

There’s also a short sequence where you have to gun down enemy planes, and the more Nazi fighters you get to take down, the fewer block posts you have to later bypass on the ground — but in reality, bypassing block posts is fun (you have to figure out the correct way to deal with each Nazi guard), while hovering with your shooting sights over the fast-moving planes is not, so I suggest simply ignoring that particular challenge anyway. All in all, that’s about all I can say in this section.

Verdict: A clumsy, but niftily absurdist take on a movie classic — and all the pixels make it even more absurdist.

As you have probably already realized for yourself, my take is that Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, as a video game, neither stands up too well to the movie that it is based upon (and this considering that already the movie itself is often thought of as the weakest part in the trilogy), nor manages to truly distinguish itself in the context of all the other classic LucasArts titles that surround it — mainly because on this occasion, the brilliant minds at LucasArts found themselves hampered by somebody else’s vision rather than egged on by their own. The second game in this short-lived series would at least be a completely new Indiana Jones adventure in its own right, but The Last Crusade probably only reinforced the understanding, already formed by titles like The Black Cauldron, that a great adventure game rigorously based on somebody else’s work of art — a book or a movie — was an impossibility, at least, in an era when the technical capacities of a videogame still lagged far beyond those of the more traditional artistic genres.

On the other hand, not all video games need to be great, and if we perceive the challenge faced by this one’s creators as a more humble one — to provide a few hours of happy entertainment to fans of Indiana Jones and video gaming — then the title is, for the most part, successful. The small, but memorable bunch of inventively designed puzzles; the extra touches of absurdist / post-modernist humor; the occasional branchings of the story where you could take it into directions only hinted at by the movie; the shift of focus from (mostly optional) action to logical puzzle-solving — in all honesty, Gilbert and Co. took the game as far as it could go, given the triple straightjacket of the movie plot, the technical limitations, and the tight budget. If anything, it remains worth playing even from that perspective alone — just to see how several talented human minds are capable of solving a problem that might, from a purely theoretical angle, appear to be unsolvable.

If I intentionally lean more heavily than usual on my cynical side, I could even say that the game brings the Indiana Jones narrative to its perfect logical conclusion — by taking everything about the original Indiana Jones that was humorous, parodic, and sarcastic and multiplying it by a factor of two, while jettisoning everything about it that seemed to take itself seriously (the morality tale elements, the romantic overtones, the Freudian father/son dramatics, etc.). If we do not get to care all that much about the fates of Elsa or Henry Jones, Sr., well, maybe it’s not because the game designers were unable to make us care, but because these characters were just a bunch of walking Hollywood clichés in the first place? Want it or not, Spielberg makes us care about his heroes, which could at least theoretically result in a bitter aftertaste of being manipulated; the Adventure Game makes you care not about the characters, but about finding all the obscure references to pop culture from antiquity to present times. In a way (though the analogy is not entirely exact) it relates to the movie similarly to the way National Lampoon’s Bored Of The Rings relates to Tolkien’s trilogy — kind of preserving the thrill of the plot, but replacing epic seriousness with total goofiness. Thus, you can just load the game up on your ScummVM emulator and think of it as a sanitary community service of sorts.

• This and other video game reviews at St. George’s Games