One of the most memorable VR experiences I’ve ever had occurred two years ago at GDC 2016. I was playing Unseen Diplomacy, a VR spy game, that required me to physically move through, crawl around, and explore my real world play space in its entirety. Because of the way the game adapted the map and funneled me in different directions, it always kept me moving without any need for boundaries or using any controllers at all.
Eye of the Temple, an upcoming Indiana Jones-inspired VR adventure game from developer Sanctum Dreams, is taking a similar concept and expanding it into a full game for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift in late 2018.
“In Eye of the Temple you explore a vast and treacherous temple using your own feet,” says Rune Skovbo Johansen, developer at Sanctum Games, in an email. “Keep your balance as you step from one moving block to another, dodging traps and solving puzzles with your torch and whip in hand.”
The teaser trailer above shows lite puzzle solving elements using a whip, plenty of platforming segments with moving stone tablets, and trapped corridors with swinging axes and blasts of fire. From what we can tell, it looks like you’ll never have to use any type of artificial locomotion or teleportation at all. As long as your play space is big enough, you’ll always have room to move around.
“The trick of the traversal in the game is to line up the moving blocks in just the right arrangement,” says Johansen. “Due to the very particular way the level design works, the gameplay can’t adapt and has a minimum play zone requirement of 2 by 2 meters, but this in turn lets you traverse the world indefinitely without ever going outside the boundary.”
Eye of the Temple is slated for a late 2018 release on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, but will require 360-degree room scale setups with at least 2 by 2 meters of space. Let us know what you think of the game so far down in the comments below!
