Indiana Jones and the Great Circle finally cracks open on Nintendo Switch 2 today, May 12, 2026 — five months after MachineGames' first-person Indy outing first landed on Xbox Series, PlayStation 5, and PC, and exactly the kind of high-profile Bethesda port the Switch 2's launch slate has been quietly stacking up since Mario Kart World shipped.
The Switch 2 cut is $69.99 / £59.99 digital, with a complete on-cart physical edition available at retail the same day. That on-cart detail matters — a lot of Switch 2 third-party launches this year have been Game-Key Card releases with mandatory downloads, and MachineGames pushed to keep Indy off that list. The full game ships on the cartridge.
Performance targets a clean 30fps, with 1080p in docked play and 720p portable. The Order of Giants DLC is bundled in at no extra cost — the same expansion that ran $9.99 on the other platforms when it shipped last year. NVIDIA DLSS upscaling does the heavy lifting on the upper-end visuals; Digital Foundry's early-look pieces had it kicking in dynamically rather than running at a fixed internal resolution, so quiet rooms stay sharp and high-action set pieces lean on the AI smoothing to keep the frame rate from buckling.
The headline new feature, though, is the control scheme. MachineGames has wired in both gyro aiming and mouse controls using the Switch 2's redesigned Joy-Con — the right stick still works as a traditional stick, but slide the Joy-Con on its edge across a tabletop and it behaves like a desktop mouse for both look and shoot. Indy's whip swings, his fist-fights, and the brief gunplay segments all benefit. Anyone who played The Great Circle with a controller on Xbox knows it's the kind of game where precise camera control during a stealth lean or a whip-grab is exactly where Switch 2's gyro shines.
Art director Axel Torvenius told Nintendo Life ahead of launch that the Switch 2 visual quality is "equal to an Xbox Series S," and that the studio's brief was to deliver a one-to-one experience instead of a stripped-down handheld port. The frame-rate cap at 30fps — rather than the 60fps the game runs at on Series X, PS5, and PC — was a deliberate trade to hold lighting, geometry, and the cinematic camera work that defines the series.
Below is Bethesda's Switch 2 reveal trailer that first dropped at gamescom Opening Night Live last August, and which has been the studio's primary marketing beat going into launch week:
Set in 1937, between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, The Great Circle puts Troy Baker's Indy on a globe-trotting chase to keep an ancient power out of fascist hands. The original release scored a Metacritic 86 across PC and Series X, hit a peak Steam concurrent of 19,000 players in its opening week, and held a 90% positive user-review score on Steam at the time of writing. The Order of Giants DLC adds a Rome-set chapter that runs roughly five to seven hours — a meaningful add-on for Switch 2 buyers picking up the game for the first time.
Switch 2 third-party support has been the platform's storyline since launch day. Cyberpunk 2077, Star Wars Outlaws, and Hitman: World of Assassination have already shipped enhanced or feature-parity ports, and Indiana Jones slots into that same lane — a console-defining AAA title built on id Tech 7, running natively on Nintendo hardware with controls tuned to the Joy-Con's quirks rather than ported in spite of them.
For Xbox owners who skipped the original launch, this is also the cheapest physical version with all the DLC included. The Great Circle has bounced between $49.99 and $59.99 on Xbox Series and PS5 across the past five months of holiday sales, but the on-cart Switch 2 release at $69.99 includes the Order of Giants DLC out of the box and works as an off-Wi-Fi handheld game with no second download, which is genuinely rare for a game of this scope landing on Switch 2 in 2026.
