Fear not, dog lovers. While plenty of games force you to do combat with canines, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will spare you the trauma of having to take down Spot in a hail of gunfire. Developer MachineGames has a clever workaround that means you’ll never have to harm a dog in its upcoming adventure game that’s both humane and in character.
"Indiana Jones is a dog person," creative director Jens Andersson told IGN, explaining MachineGames decision to make Indiana Jones and the Great Circle pooch-friendly. That fact is established in the films the game is based on, where it’s revealed that Indy went as far as naming himself after a beloved family dog. Because of that, it only makes sense that you won’t be mowing down dogs in the game the way you casually do, in so many others.
“This is obviously a little bit different than Wolfenstein as well,” Andersson said, referencing a previous MachineGames title, “where the dog will explode."
Rather than exploding any dogs in The Great Circle, you’ll simply chase them away. As IGN explains, if you point your weapon at a dog and try to shoot it, you won’t actually fire. Instead, the dog in question will take the threat to heart and wisely run away from you.
I’m more of a cat person myself, but I wish more games took The Great Circle’s pup-friendly approach, or found another workaround for dispatching their digital dogs. Sure, there’s a weird double standard in the idea that I’m more comfortable murdering human characters than canine ones, but untangling that is a job for me and for my therapist. Whether I’m just desensitized to the suffering of humans in video games or something else, it just feels worse to see an animal — even one I know is just a bunch of triangles on my TV screen — suffering.
I think it’s the yelps. The sound of a dog, or more commonly, a wolf, in pain in a video game triggers some reflex in me that just makes me want to curl up in a ball and think about what I’ve done. One of my favorite games this year is Dragon’s Dogma 2, but it’s got one big problem. There’s just a ton of wolves running around, and while credit is due to the game’s sound team for how realistic the noises they make are, it tips over from impressive to upsetting when you attack and they start howling in pain. After a while, I took to sprinting away whenever I could to avoid fighting wolves, even if it meant getting clobbered by an ogre instead.
I’m not alone here either. Murdering or threatening dogs in game or any other artform is a common trope that’s seen as an emotionally manipulative shortcut to wring strong feelings out of audiences. It can be effective if you’re looking to score an easy goal, but it just as commonly drives people away. The problem is so common that it even inspired a website called Does the Dog Die, a community-curated list that will tell you whether the dog gets sent to a nice farm upstate in all sorts of movies, TV shows, and games, along with sharing trigger warnings for all sorts of other upsetting content. Some games, like the dog-sledding adventure game Red Lantern, even include options that keep dogs alive, much to the relief of some of its players.
What makes Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s approach to the problem so good is that it’s not just an optional toggle for sensitive players — it’s an in-character default that makes sense in the game’s world. Having dogs turn tail and run when they’re threatened doesn’t break anyone’s immersion the way that immortal canines might, and it helps keep the tone of the adventure from being soured by pained cries, too. Not every game can have a solution to the dog problem as conveniently lore-friendly as The Great Circle, but frankly, it doesn’t need to. I’ll believe whatever explanation you give me if it means never having to put down another dog in a video game again.
