Dodge Deadly Traps and Solve Ancient Puzzles in ‘Eye of the Temple,’ Out Now on Meta Quest 2

Eye of the Temple is a VR adventure that takes you on a daring journey through a treacherous temple. As you attempt to uncover the ancient legend of the Eye, you’ll step between moving blocks, dodge hazardous traps, and solve environmental puzzles. After a successful launch on PC VR, solo developer Rune Skovbo Johansen teamed up with Salmi Games to bring Eye of the Temple to Meta Quest 2 + Pro, and it’s out today for $19.99 USD.

What mysteries will you uncover with just a torch, a whip, and your wits?

In Eye of the Temple, you can explore an expansive and seamless world in untethered room-scale VR thanks to an innovative movement system, and lose yourself in the depths of the temple without having to use teleportation, artificial locomotion, or other distractions. You also have a trusty whip that you can use to grab levers and defend yourself from various threats.

Eye of the Temple is an exciting experience you’ll play not with controller buttons, but with your body as you physically step from one platform to another. It’s designed to be easily approachable regardless of whether you normally play video games—just make sure you have a 6.5 feet by 6.5 feet (2m by 2m) space to play in.

To celebrate the launch, we spoke with Johansen about the origins of Eye of the Temple, how he came up with its unique navigation system, and the wide variety of inspirations (from classic platformers to Ico and Indiana Jones) behind the game.

Rune Skovbo Johansen: The core mechanic for the game dates back to January 2016, when I took part in a game jam themed around VR. This was around the time when the original Oculus headsets were only just beginning to enter the market.

At the game jam, we all had to form teams and make small VR games in one weekend. I pitched an idea for a game based entirely around physically stepping on moving platforms, and I had a pretty good idea about how that could be implemented. This led to the creation of an experimental little game we called Chrysalis Pyramid.

We put the game up for free online and I actually thought the VR project would end there for me, but then the game was downloaded more than 3800 times. As a developer, you always want to make something that becomes popular, and the high demand of our little experiment encouraged me to explore the idea further and make a more ambitious spiritual successor on my own.

Keeping only the core mechanic of stepping from one moving block to another and rethinking everything else from scratch, I began working solo and part-time on the development of Eye of the Temple in the spring of 2016.

After working on the game several days a week for four years, I eventually quit my day job by the end of 2020 to devote all my time to completing it, and the game finally came out in October 2021. In the end, I probably spent well over 5000 hours developing Eye of the Temple, and that’s before factoring in the Quest 2 version.

RSJ: The original inspiration for getting around via moving platforms comes from classic platformer games. I played the side-scrolling Sonic the Hedgehog games as a kid, and while some sections emphasized speed, there would also frequently be slower sections of jumping onto a moving platform and using it to reach another moving platform, and so on.

As the game’s scope grew and I had to think about what its world would look like, I found inspiration in my favorite PlayStation 2 game, Ico. That game had you move around atmospheric environments in a castle full of huge structures that made you feel small and in awe. I’ve done my best to incorporate similar elements in Eye of the Temple, and to establish a great sense of verticality.

Ico also featured extensive backtracking, looping back to earlier areas with new abilities, which made the game world feel more tangible and real. This, too, is something I’ve worked hard to incorporate in Eye of the Temple, even if the scope of this game is somewhat smaller.

RSJ: Yeah, the last source of inspiration is one you can probably guess: Everyone compares the game to the Indiana Jones movies. That inspiration actually came about in a curious way.

In the first six months of development, not much had been established beyond the fact that you were exploring some kind of temple and had a wooden torch in one hand. The other controller wasn’t even used for anything. But as various friends were trying out the game, a persistent refrain I kept hearing was that playing it felt like being Indiana Jones.

After hearing this enough times, I thought, “That’s not a bad experience to evoke—why not lean into it further?” Without infringing on copyright or IP, of course. So I set out to implement a physically simulated whip, since apart from the thematic boon, it also seemed like a cool and unique mechanic.

It took an enormous amount of extra time to get the whip to work optimally because I had to implement custom-made physics for it, which was far from trivial. But the result has definitely been worth it.

RSJ: Well, the biggest difference is that when you think “platformer,” you think of jumping, but in Eye of the Temple you never jump, and in fact the game tells you up front not to do it for safety reasons—otherwise you’d risk jumping right out of your play area and into a wall.

So I had to rethink platforming around stepping from one platform to another rather than jumping. Luckily there are still a lot of opportunities for platformer-like action. There are obstacles coming down from above that you need to duck under, or dodge to the side to avoid. Instead of jumping to collect coins arranged in arcs, you use your outstretched arms to collect floating gems arranged in arcs.

Classic platformers have also inspired various obstacles and challenges in the game. For example, one section is inspired by a passage in Super Mario World where you must run along a section with descending ceilings and sometimes find spots to wait for a bit where the ceiling won’t hit you. And Eye of the Temple features cylindrical roller-blocks you have to backpedal to stay on top of, which resemble the wooden logs floating in water from one of the Sonic games.

Lastly, the moving platforms produce a kind of clockwork design that can at times feel almost turn-based even though movements are in real-time. This led me to find inspiration for a few of Eye of the Temple’s challenges in the turn-based puzzle game Lara Croft Go, which is itself a reimagining of a platformer.

RSJ: Getting the large environments in the game to run at target frame rate was one of the primary challenges in bringing the game to Quest 2.

In fact, I didn’t even want to attempt a Quest 2 version before I found a partner to work with who already had a lot of experience developing for that platform. Salmi Games ended up being that partner, and even then it took all of our combined complimentary skills to pull off bringing Eye of the Temple to Quest 2.

We had to create our own manual occlusion system to supplement Unity’s built-in solution in order to support the game's expansive world. The new system disables parts of the world that currently aren’t visible anyway, according to manually defined boundaries.

The large environments also put pressure on everything else in the game, so we had to optimize certain things further than would be needed in other Quest 2 games that don’t feature such large environments. As a result, a lot of the game's visuals—such as the lighting and water effects—had to be reimplemented from scratch in order to retain the same aesthetic on mobile hardware.

RSJ: A lot of love was poured into both the original game and the Quest 2 version. We’re proud of the result and can’t wait for you to experience Eye of the Temple. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do.

Eye of the Temple is a unique adventure made for VR players of all skill levels, and you can play it today on Meta Quest 2 + Pro!