Champaign-Urbana Adventures in Time and Space: The Lost Temple

I took way too long to get around to trying Lost Temple. That was partly because it had a longish expected game time, and partly because it needed some components printed in advance – although there is a printless version provided, I was always going to play it in the recommended format. As it turns out, I should have made more of an effort to play it sooner – it’s among the very best home games I’ve tried.

The Lovecraftian plot is set in the 1930s and has you start your investigation in the office of a vanished professor, whose papers hint at dark secrets uncovered. Practically speaking, it’s played via a web interface that shows you locations and items as static images, and lets you enter codes to unlock new items and areas. In addition you have a PDF of additional resources, which introduces paper-based puzzles. The dozen pages here are unlocked out of order – at various points the game tells you that you’ve gained access to a specific page. I think you’re supposed to only look at pages when you unlock them; we bent that rule to do all the cutting out in advance, and if you find cutting out components to be more of a chore than a pleasure, I’d recommend taking the same approach.

Lost Temple’s web interface is achingly slick. Each location presents an array of photos, each showing an area of interest which you can click into to view more details. The flurry of screens and clues would get overwhelming but there’s a clear structure that makes it easy to navigate. Additional panels show a list of locks, letting you click directly on each so that you don’t have to struggle to remember where you found it; a list of which pages you’ve gained access to; a list of items you’ve found but not used; and a list of items you’ve finished with. Each item or lock is shown with a distinctive photo-quality image. The whole thing is beautifully designed in a way that you might not even notice because the interface gets out of the way and lets you focus on the game itself.

The big caveat here is that it works much better if all players are in the same location. The intention is that it supports teams who are spread across different households, with one player designated as lead and in charge of entering all codes. In practice we found it hard for the non-lead player to follow what was going on, and switched to playing by screen share instead.

That aside, the game’s platform is outstanding. The puzzles are interesting, the story is involving. Audio and visuals are all top-notch, and do a great job of setting the scene and building atmosphere. There’s a solid two hours (or thereabouts) of game time, the paper cutting requirements aren’t too onerous, and despite the eldritch horror theming it has a surprisingly cute finish. Some games stand out for doing one thing remarkably well; Lost Temple shines for consistent quality in all aspects, and it joins my shortlist of home games that I’d recommend to pretty much all players.