LEGO Indiana Jones - The Original Adventures

The whip changes everything. Where Traveller's Tales' Star Wars games leaned on Force powers and lightsabers to solve rooms, Indy's coiled leather does triple duty: it yanks levers across a gap, it hooks rings to swing over a pit, and it drags crates into place. That single tool forces the studio to rethink its own puzzle grammar, and the Temple of Doom and Last Crusade levels are better for it, built around reach and leverage rather than raw destruction.

The structure is the familiar one. Three films compressed into six chapters apiece, played co-operatively on one screen, with a hub — the Barnett College campus — connecting them and hiding its own secrets. Characters are sorted by ability rather than personality: Indy whips and punches, Willie screams to shatter glass, Short Round crawls through low hatches, and anyone in a dig-site outfit can shovel soft ground. Swapping between them on the fly is the whole design, and the game is generous about telling you when a wall needs something you do not currently have.

What gives this one more character than most of the LEGO run is its willingness to be funny about the source. The cutscenes are silent, mimed, and built on the assumption you know the films well enough to catch the joke. Indy losing his hat and scrambling for it. The Ark's face-melting finale rendered as minifigures cheerfully falling apart. The Kali Ma heart-pull staged as a gag rather than a nightmare. It lands because the animation is genuinely sharp, not because the reference is present.

Combat is where it sags. Enemies come in waves, respawn without much thought, and punching them is a matter of standing close and mashing. The improvised-weapon gimmick — grabbing shovels, bottles and frying pans off the scenery — is a nice idea that amounts to a slightly different swing animation. Free Play, the unlocked mode that lets you bring any character back to any level, remains the real game, because only there can you finally reach the chests you spent your first run walking past.

The PS2 version runs a little softer than its contemporaries on other hardware, with some crowding when four or five bodies are on screen, but the drop-in second player has aged better than almost anything else in the genre. A parent can pick up a controller mid-level and be useful within thirty seconds. That low barrier, more than any puzzle in it, is why the thing still gets pulled off the shelf.