This is only like the seventh best LucasArts point-and-click, but it's also the third best Indiana Jones movie which absolves a lot of its sins. And sins it has: the percentage of obtuse puzzles is substantially higher than in, say, a Monkey Island; the combat is both boring and too densely packed (granted I accidentally selected the combat route, but this is even true in the route-independent Act III); and it requires a tremendous amount of slow traversal when you're trying to find the one pixel you didn't click on in the entire accessible game world.

But the writing and plotting are both fun, and it really does manage to capture that Indy spirit in the way the recent films absolutely didn't. The lack of Harrison Ford is pointedly felt, but everything else about it really does hit. It's also doing some interesting formal things: it has a few moments of genuinely inspired design, like the experience of feeling around in dark rooms while your eyes adjust, and its multi-route structure presages the team's later replayability strategies for Humongous Entertainment games. I'm quietly impressed, even if I don't actually want to play the game again.

To be totally honest, with my only experiences with this series being Armored Core: For Answer (just a handful of hours) and Armored Core VI (platinum'd), I expected to find the first entry in the series—predating them by 11 and 26 years respectively—a lot rougher around the edges than it actually was.

There are only two complaints I can really level against this game. First, the controls are fairly awkward, which is more or less an inevitability for a game that asks you to perform complex movement through 3D space before the advent of dual-stick controllers. And once I remapped my controls (L hori → L1/R1, R hori → L hori, R vert → L2/R2) it was mistakable for a modern scheme, although the vertical sensitivity was still iffy enough that I still generally tried to avoid relying on it.

The second is the balance, and this is maybe too much of a nitpick. Relatively early on I found the WG-1-KARASAWA laser rifle, which just absolutely tore through the rest of the game. As long as I had enough distance on an enemy to make up for its narrow targeting range, I could just let it rip and expect them to die. With that said, there were plenty of missions that encouraged me to use different builds, and I could have stopped leaning so hard on those lasers any time I wanted, so it's my fault as much as the game's.

A few additional points that are just bouncing around my head:

• Having the first two mission choices be "Eliminate Squatters" or "Eliminate Strikers" is just so so good. Immediately communicates the game's politic and the player's place within the system. I can't get over how much I love that specific screen.

• The music in this goes incredibly hard. Shouts out to Masaru Tateyama and Keiichiro Segawa, I will buy you two a drink if I ever get the chance.

• Despite how hard it is in practice to actually do 3D combat with this game's controls, I respect the ambition to swing for it. It clearly paid off, since that combat works fabulously in later entries with proper dual stick control schemes.

• The way the game's monetary economy intersects with its save economy is odd. If you lose a mission, you still have to pay for ammunition and repairs, and you can in fact go into debt because of this, which is really cool. But you can also save between every mission, so a savvy player is never going to log a lost mission on their record. You could imagine doing a "no save-scum" challenge run, but at the point at which you're comfortable enough to do that you're unlikely to be outright losing anyway—the missions just aren't that hard once you know what you're doing. So what exactly is this debt mechanic for? I don't know.