Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Around the World in 1937

The thief's medallion bears a symbol of the Vatican Secret Archive, so Indy slips into Vatican City, which the game shows patrolled by Mussolini's Blackshirts. There he meets the reporter Gina Lombardi and learns of an order of giants that has guarded the Great Circle for the Church. The occupation is invented: since the Lateran Treaty of 1929, signed with Mussolini himself, the Vatican has been an independent state. The archive is real. Closed to outsiders until the late 19th century, it has since been renamed the Vatican Apostolic Archive: "secret" had always meant "private", the pope's own papers.

Following Voss's zeppelin, Indy and Gina reach a Nazi dig at Gizeh, the game's spelling of Giza, one of its large open areas, and hunt for the Idol of Ra, until Voss snatches its stone and leaves Indy for dead in the desert. The Great Sphinx, carved from the bedrock under Khufu or Khafre around 2550 BC, is 73 metres long and 20 metres high. Whose face it shows is still disputed, and so is how it lost its nose, though the old story that Napoleon's soldiers shot it off is a myth.

Visitor guidance: The Sphinx sits at the foot of the pyramid plateau, beside the Valley Temple of Khafre, and is included in the main Giza ticket.

The third stone has teleported a whole Nazi battleship from South America onto a Himalayan mountainside. Indy finds Gina's missing sister frozen to death there, escapes a Nazi colonel and sends the ship sliding down the slope. The battleship is fantasy, but the Nazis' interest in the roof of the world was real. In 1938–39 an expedition under the zoologist and SS officer Ernst Schäfer, sponsored by Heinrich Himmler, crossed Sikkim and spent two months in Lhasa, measuring skulls in search of the origins of the "Aryan race".

Location precision: The game doesn't name a place in the Himalayas, so this point is not pinned.

A portal throws Indy and Gina into Shanghai during the Japanese assault of 1937, where they escape in a stolen Japanese fighter. The Battle of Shanghai, from 13 August to 26 November 1937, was the opening battle of China's war with Japan and the largest urban battle before Stalingrad; some historians call it the first battle of the Second World War. On 14 August stray Chinese bombs meant for the Japanese flagship, moored off the Bund, fell into the foreign International Settlement and killed 700–950 civilians. The Bund's banks and hotels from the 1920s and 1930s still line the river.

Location precision: The game's Shanghai scenes aren't tied to one street; the pin marks the Bund.

Visitor guidance: The Bund's riverside promenade is best walked at dusk, when the historic façades and the Pudong skyline across the river light up.

The next stone lies in Sukhothai in Siam, another of the game's large explorable areas, where Indy wades through flooded temple ruins, is warned off by the giant Locus, and loses Gina to Voss. Sukhothai, "dawn of happiness", was the capital of the first great Thai kingdom in the 13th and 14th centuries. Its largest temple, Wat Mahathat, has a central stupa shaped like a lotus bud, a Sukhothai hallmark, ringed by 168 stucco disciples walking in prayer. The old city has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991.

Visitor guidance: The historical park's 193 ruins are spread over a wide area; most visitors get around by bicycle.

The circle ends at the ziggurat of Ur, where Indy finds Noah's Ark and Voss tries to unleash a second Great Flood. The game borrows from real archaeology. Leonard Woolley, who excavated Ur in the 1920s and 1930s, found a thick layer of flood silt and argued that the biblical Flood was a real but local disaster in Mesopotamia. The ziggurat itself was built by King Ur-Nammu in the 21st century BC; its lower terraces and great staircase, partly reconstructed in the 1980s, are the best preserved of any Mesopotamian ziggurat.