With Indiana Jones and the Great Circle now on PS5, let's crown it the friendliest immersive sim yet and a celebration of muddling through

When speaking to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle design director Jens Andersson last year, I wondered aloud whether his game might be an immersive sim. He bristled slightly at the suggestion, and I completely understand why. The term coined by Looking Glass, creators of System Shock and Thief, speaks of player-led possibilities – the freedom to approach dangerous scenarios your own way, and to define your own moral compass. But it’s also limiting.

Invoking the imsim is a little like the ringing of a bell, conjuring all sorts of very specific yet arbitrary expectations, from hacking and turrets to an unbroken first-person perspective – the latter of which Indiana Jones doesn’t have. “It’s like using the word Metroidvania,” Andersson said. “It means different things to different people.”

So it would be counterproductive to sell a game as varied as the Great Circle, with its high-wire setpieces, photographic exploration and pondersome side puzzles, as a successor to Thief or Deus Ex. But after more than 20 hours in its company, I’m now perfectly comfortably slapping the game with the imsim label that makes marketing managers so nervous, and pronouncing it a fantastic example of the form. A much-needed one, if the beloved genre is to break out of the rather rarified niche it has found itself in of late.

One problem immersive sims have had is that – as Thief designer Randy Smith once told me about his games – they’re not comfort food. They demand close attention, asking you to plot routes through dense levels, master finicky stealth systems and, once you’ve encountered an enemy, decide whether or not you want to break cover at all. While in theory they support all kinds of play, in practice, games like Deus Ex and Dishonored dissuade bloodshed by employing friendly NPCs to tell you off. They invite you to question yourself, which is not always a comfortable spot to be in.