Eye of the Temple is an upcoming room-scale puzzle game that basically turns you into Indiana Jones—torch, hat, and bullwhip included. Now developer Rune Skovbo Johansen says the full game is aiming to release on SteamVR headsets sometime this spring.
Until recently, Rune Skovbo Johansen worked at Unity as a senior software engineer, working on Eye of the Temple as an indie developer in his spare time. Although originally hoping to release in 2020, since leaving his position at Unity’s Copenhagen, Denmark offices Johansen says in a tweet that he’ll have more time now to focus on getting the game out.
We went hands-on with the Eye of the Temple’s demo back shortly after it was released on Steam in August, and we were really impressed with what we saw. The demo hosts a vast temple complex where you dodge and duck your way through perilous traps and genuinely head-scratching puzzles.
In the impressively large demo (it took us 45 minutes to complete), you use your bullwhip to grab out-of-reach levers, which control everything from moving platforms to giant stone puzzles. The level design is extremely dense too, so much so it feels like standing inside of manual watch.
One of the most unique features of the game is the room-scale based locomotion style. You move through the game primarily though moving platforms, which sometimes are simple stone pavers that navigate above death pits, and other times on rotating stone cylinders, which require you to physically back up in your space so you can stay on top of them—sort of like a real-life log roll.
If the finished game is half as impressive as the demo, it’s clear we’re in for a room-scale treat the likes of which we haven’t seen since the early days on consumer VR. The demo is still available for free on Steam too, supporting SteamVR headsets including Valve Index, HTC Vive, Windows MR, Oculus Rift, and Oculus Quest via Link.