Nowadays room-scale virtual reality (VR) tends to be thought of as second nature, being able to hide behind a wall to avoid being spotted or leaning out to look over a cliff edge. Yet how many actually use the functionality as a core feature of the gameplay? Upcoming indie title Eye of the Temple certainly does and now you get to try it for yourself thanks to a free demo.
Created by Danish indie developer Rune Skovbo Johansen, Eye of the Temple is a puzzle adventure where you have to make it through a treacherous ancient temple. The main hook being that there’s no teleportation or smooth locomotion, you have to use your own feet to step between various moving blocks.
This means you do need a minimum (clutter-free) play area of 2 x 2 metres to be able to move around. And to give it that classic Indiana Jones flavour you’re equipped with a flaming torch and a whip, both of which are required to solve the many temple puzzles. These tools also mean there are no button layouts to remember, it’s all physical movements.
Johansen has been developing Eye of the Temple for the past four years with plans to launch the videogame later this year. In preparation for that, he has released a demo called ‘First Steps’ to give players a taste of the gameplay. To get hold of the demo you’ll need to join Eye of the Temple’s Discord server where you can request a Steam key. At the same time, the developer has also released a new mixed reality (MR) trailer to show the title in action.
“It’s hard to convey from first-person footage alone the way you get around everywhere with just your own feet, without teleportation, artificial locomotion, or other distractions taking you out of the immersion,” said Johansen in a statement. “The new mixed reality trailer shows it better, and now with the demo you can get to experience it for yourself too.”
Eye of the Temple will support the usual PC VR headsets including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Valve Index and Windows Mixed Reality. For further updates on the room-scale adventure, keep reading VRFocus.
