A new day, a new VR game – and another one I discovered on TikTok. At first glance, “The Eye of the Temple” looked like a bootleg-version of Indiana Jones. I love Indiana Jones so I had to try it. You can read how I liked it here.

“The Eye of the Temple” is a very interesting game, especially game mechanics wise. It solves a movement problem in a way I’ve never seen before, and it worked surprisingly well. What that is, later; let’s go over the basics first.

Let’s start with the easiest aspect, the story. We are at a temple and we must enter to defeat evil. Finished. It’s nothing more. But that’s not bad at all, because in this case the journey is the goal; of course, we can’t just march through the front entrance, we have to solve numerous puzzles, defeat enemies and, most importantly, dodge traps to get there. Along the way, we occasionally unlock new skills that take us to new areas, and collect points to achieve a high score later.

We keep coming across shrines that explain how it came about that we have to defeat evil – as I said, nothing special, but a nice addition that at least gives you a little motivation why you do it at all. But I didn’t need it at all, because it was great fun just to get ahead.

Before we explain how to proceed at all, let’s go into the puzzles: these are mostly kept quite simple, but can also be quite complex. Most of the time you have to use your whole body to avoid traps or fend off attackers in the form of oversized bugs, but from time to time there is also a complex task, such as logically working out a way to get somewhere. A torch to light up dark corridors and ignite braziers, as well as a whip to fend off attackers and activate switches and levers will help you along the way. The whip only unfurls when there is action to be taken; this helped to figure out what it takes to make a corresponding puzzle.

But now for the really interesting part: the movement. Most of the VR games nowadays have two main forms: direct movement or teleportation. Direct movement uses one of the sticks on the controller to move around like you would in a classic game – but it’s not suitable if you’re prone to motion sickness. With teleportation… well, you teleport yourself. You sort of point to where you want to go, the screen goes black for a moment and then brightens up again and you’re there – avoiding motion sickness but also a realistic feel.

This game goes a completely different way: you need a playing area of about 2.5×2.5 meters (my experience) and you only move in this area, by physically walking. Whenever you reach an edge of this area, the game cleverly steers you in another direction. You don’t walk on straight paths, but stand again and again on blocks of stone, which then move back and forth. Alternatively, there are also stone rollers on which you then have to tip forwards or backwards, which also moves you to new points on your playing surface.

I find this technique very elegant. It prevents motion sickness through your own movement, but still allows you to cover large distances. Because you can always see the stone surface below, the body does not receive any confusing information that would make you sick- very elegantly solved and probably a horror to design it exactly so that it always works.

An exception to this system was the lorry. With this you could travel quickly from one point to another later in the game – like in a roller coaster. Again, this is a horror for people prone to motion sickness; in this case, however, there was an option with which one could design the journeys as teleportation. I drove directly and had no problems, if you have them you can still enjoy the game. I was very pleased with how well thought out the game is.

Finally, the technical aspect, pro forma: on the whole the game went very well. Technical errors turned out to be connectivity issues with my headset, so the game can’t be blamed here (we’re talking lag or artifacts). Otherwise it went fine. The playing area that is specified on Steam is a little too small, I kept running into the Guardian – add maybe half a meter on two sides.

Overall, though, I really enjoyed the game. I’m really happy to have discovered it and that we had so much fun with it. The new form of movement was very interesting and the puzzles and traps were very imaginative. With almost 4 hours of playing time, it was more than worth its price on offer – I would probably also have paid the full price. The high score mechanism was irrelevant to me personally, but if you want you can spend even more time in it.

How did you like the game? Do you share my opinion or do you have a completely different one? Feel free to join the discussion on Discord!