Indiana Jones And The Great Circle Has A Hidden Way To Recover From Softlock Nightmares

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a fantastic time, and I’m playing it in every spare second I can find. But another thing it is, on PC at least, is buggy. I’ve had a bunch of freezes, which suck, but worst was the moment when companion Gina just refused to follow her script, and my game—which offers no way to manually save—was softlocked. But, it turns out, there’s a rather hidden feature that got me out of trouble!

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Searching around on the worldwide information superhighway, I know I’m not alone in hitting an issue with Gina’s AI in the Collapsed Hall section within Gizeh. While I’ve seen posts from others reporting it occurring in slightly different sections of the level, the problem remains the same: she just refuses to budge, and therefore doesn’t trigger an obligatory sequence of dialogue that’s required to let you continue. And that sucks too.

It sucks even more that without a quicksave, nor even a manual save (why? why?!), the bug was locked in already at the point the game had last saved for me. Jumping into a pit caused Gina to wake from her stupor and wail at my demise, but then she was back, catatonic, staring at a wall when I miraculously revived. I felt completely stuck, no way to get out of this pickle. Until I saw mention of a “rollback” option. (Thank you, Redditor budstudly!)

How to restore previous checkpoints using Save Rollback

The reason you likely haven’t even heard of this possibility is that the game hides it in its in-game menus! The standard pause screen has an option to “Restart Checkpoint,” which is useless if you’re in a similar situation. However, if you instead choose the bizarrely titled “Quit Game,” which does in fact not quit the game but takes you back to the main menu, you’ll see an option called “Game Slots.”

Yes, I know, that’s the section for picking which of the three concurrent versions of the game you want to play in, and yet, yes, this is where the secret is hidden. It’s like finding an ancient artefact in a mysterious tomb! Because tucked away at the bottom-left of the screen is text that opaquely says, “Save Rollback.”

This odd terminology hides a little menu that contains the three previous checkpoint saves that occurred before the current one (there’s no clear explanation of this, but none of them is the most recent), letting you jump back in time to an earlier moment. The times they’re labeled with are not clock times, but rather indicate how long you’d been playing, so you’ll be able to see how many minutes of progress you’re about to lament repeating—in my particular case it was only about five minutes, although it involved solving a boring mirror puzzle for a second time, complete with unskippable cutscenes.

I’m so relieved this feature is in the game, given otherwise I’d have lost 10 hours of progress and likely never bothered playing again. But it remains a mystery greater than any Indy ever investigated why you can’t just manually save for yourself.