Like a lot of people, I suspect, I watched the trailer for Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, Bethesda's new game and pondered: what's the best Indy game we've gotten so far? I remember that NaturalMotion game from a while back which never came out - I've spoken over the years to people who played bits of it and said it was wonderful. It's harmonious, really: a game that has become a bit of a myth, buried by the sands of time.
But what about games we actually got? This is a tricky question with something like Indiana Jones, I reckon, because Indy's been game-adjacent since the days of Pitfall! in 1982. Just as Raiders of the Lost Ark was inspired by the pulps and serials its creators grew up watching, Indy himself has given a lot to games without really being in them as such.
So it's tempting for me to say something like Spelunky is the best Indy game ever. You certainly have the iconography - the hat, the whip, the idols, the traps. Spelunky would look very different if the opening fifteen minutes of Raiders didn't exist. But the more I think about it the more that doesn't seem fair to Indy or Spelunky. Spelunky is an Indiana Jones game, perhaps, in the same way that Super Mario Bros is an Alice in Wonderland game - there's a jumping-off point there, but the unexpected richness that emerges makes each game its own thing.