Greetings, fellow nauseated traveler who just wanted to enjoy Indiana Jones and the Great Circle but couldn’t manage to play for longer than an hour at a time. You’ve come to the right place. I, too, couldn’t deal with the strange head bob that our hero does in this first-person game. Through a combination of tweaks to the settings in the options menu, I’ve managed to make the game playable for myself — and probably for you, too.
Is it still a bit dizzying sometimes? Yes. Do I still wish the team at MachineGames would remove the head bob entirely? Yes. Please. But until that happens, these are my suggestions for getting through this adventure.
First, open the options menu, and go to the section called “Video.” In that section, you can start by implementing my most effective change, which unfortunately will only be available in this menu if you’re playing on PC and not console. This suggestion is to increase the Field of View slider to at least 100. You can even put it up to 110 if you want; try different levels and see what works best for you.
These next options are available on both console and PC. Go down to Motion Blur and set it to “off” (apologies to this particular artistic decision).
The last setting in this section that you might consider is called “Picture Framing” — it’s at the top of the list in the screenshot above. I have my entire game in “Cinematic” mode, which means that both gameplay and cutscenes have black bars on the top and bottom of the screen, all the time. It’s supposed to make the game look like a movie. Honestly, I don’t love the look of it (and I think it’s a corny conceit), but it does seem to be helping my nausea levels.
We’re still not done. Next, navigate to the “Accessibility” menu.
You can adjust the Field of View and Motion Blur here as well, but you’ve already done that, right?
More importantly, you’re going to want to set Camera Stabilization to “on,” and Screen Shake to “off.”
Lastly, try to sit further away from your screen when you play. It will help with this issue. And while you’re in this menu, you can increase the size of the subtitles to accommodate an increased distance from the screen.
If all else fails, and you’re playing on PC, just wait for somebody to make a mod that fixes Indy’s penchant for bobbing his head every time he takes a single step — or a mod that puts the entire game into third-person mode (it’s definitely possible). Until then, these band-aids are what we have.
