29/06/2020
The Hivemind at Room Escape Artist has spoken - in a review of Temporal Tangle Online. After what's been a rough few weeks, it really made our day! Click on the link below to check it out, and read on to see our design process for adapting it.
We didn't want to do a straight adaptation of the physical game, because you miss out on aspects such as handling props and opening locks. So, we decided to make full use of the digital medium and use it to do things you couldn't do with a physical room.
One of the things was deepening the narrative. A Temporal Tangle was already a narrative-heavy room, and we discovered that with the excitement of a physical room, many players would quickly forget it about it as they got caught up in the puzzles, meaning the ending would come as a bit of a surprise. But with an online game, you can have a narrator providing commentary that digs deeper into the story, and the two characters at the heart of the game. With sass! We were also able to add voice acting for notes that you find in the game, adding more emotion and complexity.
We also created a dedicated inventory system to help streamline the game for players. In a physical game, it's easy to get caught up in ALL THE ITEMS. Although A Temporal Tangle was designed to be linear and cater to newer players, we've found that they can still be caught up in items they've already used, or put items aside for later and forget about them if they're not keeping track. The inventory system, which automatically discards used items and changes
[MINOR SPOILER ALERT] There were also elements where we wanted to still capture the fun of physical things you do in the room, such as looking around with a blacklight. Though at first we toyed with simply clicking on areas in the sphere to view a 'UV' image, it didn't have the same wow-factor. And so, we nutted out code that would actually let you feel like you were shining a light on the image as you move your cursor around - which was 100% worth the additional effort and we think we pulled off the fun of it!
All this to say, we didn't want to simply adapt our game - we wanted to adapt FOR THE MEDIUM, and we're so pleased that it made for a fun game!
Some of the comments included:
"Temporal Tangle Online was by far the best implementation of a point-and-click escape game I’ve seen yet, and I can’t imagine many games in this format beating this experience."
"A terrific translation of a physical room to a videogame format, with a good sense of humor"
"Excellent voice acting"
"I was pleasantly surprised by how much the narrative appealed to me."
"If you only have time for one game, and think your computer can run it — this is the game I’d recommend over and over again."
Interested in checking it out? You can learn more (and play a demo) here: https://www.nextlevelescape.com.au/purchase-a-temporal-tangle-online/
Temporal Tangle Online is a recreation of a real-life escape room as a point-and-click adventure game created by Next Level Escape in Sydney, Australia.
