Behind the Build: Approachable and Immersive Design in ‘Eye of the Temple’

Immersion can mean many things, and VR has lifted the ceiling for immersion in games higher than ever before. In this article, I’ll detail how a design dogma of “embodied immersion” in Eye of the Temple (out today on the Meta Quest Store) goes hand-in-hand with making the game highly approachable—even for people who don’t normally play video games.

When we say that a game is immersive, we sometimes mean that we’ve become engrossed in the game in such a way that time flies and we lose track of everything else around us (often referred to as a flow state). Some of that is simply engagement, like becoming emotionally invested in a story, world, or set of characters—or highly engaging gameplay.

Another angle to immersion is that there’s little or nothing in the game that pulls us out of the experience by breaking our suspension of disbelief. Examples of immersion-breaking elements in games include:

VR has had to tread a lot of new ground with regards to UI and control schemes. In many ways, we’re still figuring things out.

At the same time, VR games can be uniquely immersive in a way that traditional flatscreen games can’t be. And as designers, it’s interesting to think about how to best design our UI, control schemes, and game worlds to make full use of that immersion and not break the spell.

In room-scale VR, you bring your own body into the game—you can look with your head, step around with your feet, and move your hands. In this way, VR is embodied in a way that flatscreen games are not. Elements of your body’s movements carry into the game one-to-one and make you feel like you’re physically present in the virtual world.

However, there are limitations to this embodiment. For one, only specific parts of your body are tracked. Tracking beyond head and hands is already technically possible, but very few people have access to it right now. Additionally, if you want to move more than a few steps, you’ll likely need to engage with some kind of interface or control scheme—like using a thumbstick or trackpad on the controllers to move within the virtual space. Since your physical body doesn’t mimic the same movement as your virtual body, this breaks the sense of embodied immersion.

For example, you might press a button on your controller and point to a spot where you want to teleport. But unless the game’s fiction incorporates a handheld device that you can use to teleport with, this mechanic can be immersion-breaking, temporarily removing your sense of embodiment whenever you teleport to a new spot.

Similarly, if you can pick up objects in the game, you typically don’t have to bend down and pick them up yourself—instead, you press or hold a button on the controller, which translates to picking something up in-game. One-to-one embodiment isn’t present here either, though controllers with finger proximity sensors can remedy this to an extent.

Apart from being positive for engagement, embodied immersion has another big advantage: It doesn’t have to be learned.

When someone tries VR for the first time, they don’t have to learn how to look around with their head—they can draw solely on their experiences from the physical world. They don’t need to learn how to take steps to get around in room-scale VR either (though learning about Guardian and its boundaries may still be needed). And they don’t need to learn how to hold an object and swing it around or point at something with it (though picking up an object may be a different matter).

That means there’s a direct correlation between how embodied and immersive a VR game is and the upper ceiling for how intuitive it can be (in the sense of not requiring prior game literacy and experience)—or put another way, how approachable it can be.

The fewer interfaces and control schemes people have to learn, the more they can draw solely on their physical-world experiences and jump right into the game.

There was a time when most games had clearly visible UI elements, like showing how much health and ammo you have on the screen. But since these elements can detract from immersion and the suspension of disbelief, games began to make them more subtle or, in some cases, hide them from the player (either partially or temporarily).

Portal (2007) is an early example of a game that took out the health bar entirely and had almost no HUD elements save for the—admittedly important—reticle. Limbo (2010) is another notable game with no interface to detract from the experience. An atypically early game with no interface is Another World (1991).

Having little to no visual interface arguably makes these games more immersive. Whether this also makes them more approachable is questionable. It’s not as easy for players of flatscreen games to draw on real-life experience when it comes to interacting with the game world—there will always be a control scheme between the player and the game. And this control scheme has to be learned.

In VR, we can go a step further and remove that layer of complexity. We can make fully interactive experiences and games that don’t need buttons or other controls at all.

This is part of the embodied immersion dogma in Eye of the Temple, and the whole game is designed around it. Eye of the Temple doesn’t use controller buttons or thumbsticks at all, instead relying entirely on hand and body movements. Let’s look at a few examples:

Of course, not using any buttons imposes some serious limitations on game design. But that’s the case for all games that try to reduce interfaces. It’s no coincidence that games like Another World, Portal, and Limbo had no inventory for players to manage. The gameplay and the interface design (or lack thereof) need to fit each other.

So what are some interactions you can have in VR without using any buttons, thumbsticks, trackpads, or other control schemes? For Eye of the Temple, some of the things you can do are:

Most of these interactions are quite specific to Eye of the Temple, and other VR games aiming to remove the need for buttons or interfaces would likely need to design their own interactions that fit both the restrictions as well as the design and theme of the specific game.

It’s worth noting that there are still interface elements in Eye of the Temple, like levers that can be pulled and torches that can be lit. However, these aren’t interfaces between the player playing the game and the game world, but rather interfaces that exist within the game world itself—just like how there are interfaces all around us in the physical world, such as door handles, knobs on stoves, and steering wheels.

Some of the game’s more advanced interactions, like using the whip to grab and turn a lever from a distance, may take a little while to learn, though I haven’t yet seen anyone trying the game who didn’t figure out almost immediately that this is what they had to do, even if actually pulling it off could take a bit longer. But even if a player can’t figure this out immediately, the process of figuring it out doesn’t separate the player from playing the game and being immersed in it, but rather is an intrinsic part of being inside the game experience. You’d have to go through a similar problem-solving process if you were faced with the same challenge in the physical world.

Eye of the Temple’s embodied immersion dogma means that no buttons or interface elements could come between the player and the game. But as the saying goes, you should know when to bend the rules and when to break them. That applies when setting up rules for yourself as well.

Eye of the Temple uses a single button on the controller, which brings up the in-game menu. From there you can access various settings and quit the game. No buttons are used to navigate the menu, only that one button to open it—and yet this still breaks the “no buttons” rule of the game’s dogma. It’s worth noting, however, that you never have to use this button. You can play the entire game, from beginning to end, without ever bringing up the in-game menu—provided you’re okay with not changing any settings.

Furthermore, settings and quitting the game are examples of meta-communication that communicates with the player playing the game, and they don’t make sense within the game’s fiction. While this breaks the sense of immersion, it can’t be avoided. So I’m comfortable with this compromise of pressing an immersion-breaking button to access immersion-breaking menus.

Another compromise is that text is displayed to the player when they discover or enter a new area in the game. The text is displayed diegetically, but nonetheless, it’s meta-communication that’s not part of the fiction of the game. There are also optional subtitles for voiced parts of the game. Text like this breaks immersion to an extent, but I found that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages enough to justify it.

While modern controllers with proximity sensors or controller-less hand tracking may make it more intuitive to pick up and manipulate objects, getting around a large virtual world in an embodied and immersive way is a tougher problem to solve. There have been a lot of creative solutions for addressing locomotion in VR—let’s compare some of the common ones with regard to immersion and approachability.

Movement systems that are widely applicable but have costs when it comes to both immersion and approachability include:

In contrast, the following approaches can be highly immersive and accessible, but they put strict limitations on the game design:

The platforming in Eye of the Temple fits snugly together with other approaches that are highly immersive and accessible, but only really work for certain types of games.

Compared to the other of those approaches, platforming lets the player traverse unlimited large spaces using their physical body, and it also lets the player get a solid sense of the places they visit since they exist in a Euclidean space. The big limitation is that the player must constantly stay on platforms rather than being able to move across large floors.

Is it worth it to go to these lengths to remove interface elements in order to achieve immersion and approachability, even when it imposes such severe design restrictions? The answer to this will differ for every game.

For Eye of the Temple, the reactions of people who’ve tried it—from veteran VR enthusiasts to people who normally don’t play games at all—have made it clear that it was very much worth the effort for this game.

Eye of the Temple is out today on the Meta Quest Store if you want to experience its approach to design and immersion for yourself.