On September 4, 2025, Bethesda Softworks released a downloadable content pack for the critically acclaimed Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, an award-winning first-person action-adventure game based on Disney and Lucasfilm's Indiana Jones film franchise. It brings the titular hero into a brand new mystery deep beneath the streets of Rome, Italy, while he began his search for the Great Circle in the nearby Vatican City, where he uncovers the secrets of the Nephilim, a race of enlarged humans, one which had broke into Marshall College to begin the whole story.
After weeks of contemplating what kind of fan art that crossed Candy Crush Saga and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (which I have been doing to celebrate how both games were published by Xbox subsidiaries) would best honor the release of Great Circle's DLC, I have finally decided upon a faithful recreation of the initial state of the DLC's first puzzle, the Water Serpent. To put a more Candy Crush-style spin on it, Indy is portrayed by Mr. Dragon, the husband of Denize, as always, and the puzzle spews purple soda instead of water, as a nod to Candy Crush's sequel, Candy Crush Soda Saga. (I initially made it lemonade to refer to Denize's Lemonade Lake, but I decided to go with soda to differentiate snakes from Candy Crush's wonderful dragons.)
The actual Water Serpent puzzle, for your comparison, can be seen here:
Believe me, it's not so easy to make it. In fact, it was the most challenging piece that I had ever made in my career of Candy Crush Saga fan art for one big reason: I was obligated to faithfully reproduce the full appearance of the entire Water Serpent puzzle, walls, floor, ceiling and all. This involved several hurdles that I had to overcome to put it all together.
The first issue was that I had to get the perspective right. First things first, you should know that I am no professional artist, and I don't have a significant grasp on how to make the perspective inside of a room look right. It was so difficult that I had to scrap one initial attempt to draw this picture altogether. Secondly, I also had to meticulously view different videos of the puzzle in action to further craft out a proper recreation of the puzzle room, and I had to do it nearly a thousand times to make sure everything was right.
A third challenge I faced was how I was going to get the giant snake fountain to still look huge and imposing as it hung over the whole puzzle, dispensing the soda needed to open the door locks. A great amount of looking back at videos of the puzzle room as it was being solved by players was crucial to helping me figure this out.
A fourth challenge was that I wanted to give the image a cinematic look, showing Mr. Dragon as Indy staring down the snake fountain. To make it possible, he needed to be shown holding a serpent wrench over the frontmost of the 25 basins on the puzzle grid (facing him) so that he could look up at the snake. The one problem? In my efforts to also recreate the initial state of the actual puzzle as it appeared in the game, that basin did not have a socket that he could plug the wrench into. With no other place he could put it for that cinematic look that I wanted to go with, I decided to have him just stand at the basin holding the wrench over it, without still being able to plug it in.
One reason why I wanted to show the initial state of the puzzle was not just because I wanted some sense of authenticity of what I'm capturing here, but also because I thought it would be too difficult to show the puzzle while Indy's in the middle of solving it, as this requires drawing the covers that block most of the basins of the puzzle rising up to free up the rest of the puzzle. And speaking of those covers, I do want to say that oh, yes, they were still hard to draw even while in their starting positions. Making the chains that lift up the covers was one of the final challenges I faced in finishing up the picture, as I had to be careful to precisely erase parts of the chains that would be obscured from the picture's viewing angle.
All in all, it took several hours for me to finally complete the picture. And I was amazed at how good it looks, and it is not only a good homage to a puzzle in Great Circle's DLC, it is also a sweet finale to my Candy Crush Saga x Indiana Jones and the Great Circle fan art collection that has been a passion project of mine. @QueenB , what are your thoughts?
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and its DLC pack The Order of Giants is now available on Microsoft Windows, Xbox Series, PlayStation 5 and Amazon Luna, developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda Softworks. A Nintendo Switch 2 port is in development and is planned to release in 2026. Rated Teen by the ESRB for blood and gore, drug reference, mild language and violence.
