I am a casual fan of the expansive Doctor Who franchise. I grew up catching the odd episode starting the Third Doctor and liked it well enough when it came through over here in the States on PBS. Since the reboot series starting with the Ninth Doctor, I’ve mostly kept up with it through YouTube clips and the odd special that my brother loves putting on during the holiday season. With the series being so large one thing that I’ve always found odd is the fact that for such a worldwide franchise, especially in the modern age, that Doctor Who has never had much luck in the video game space. Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality looks to change that, and from the early screenshots and information that I was privy to, it seemed poised to do just that.
Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality isn’t like any other Doctor Who game that has come before. It’s far removed from the old pixelated cheating side-scrollers from the Amiga/DOS days, different than the really bad 3D side-scroller Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock that somehow managed to release on the PS3, and sort of different than the third-person action adventure title that hit PC in the form of Doctor Who: The Adventure Games. At the very least, it’ll be hard for Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality to be the worst Doctor Who game released this decade. Even saying that, though, Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality is a pretty bad game, but it’s not entirely the games fault. Let me explain.
Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality has the same issues that I complain about when various mobile games get ported to the PC: not taking advantage of the new platform. That practice has sort of faded away, but it’s now been replaced with VR games ported to non-VR platforms. The issue is that the game loses just about anything and everything that makes it special or unique when you strip away the gimmick. This is a shame as Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality really does seem like it would make for a pretty fantastic VR experience, especially for Doctor Who fans out there. Unfortunately, when you strip away the VR you are left with a pretty empty and lifeless feeling game that asks very, very little of the player.
The game is built with VR in mind. Every time something happened that was sort of interesting, I was left thinking just how much better, how much more of an impact, it would have had with a VR headset on. You see, Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality is a very cramped game because it was built for the mostly stationary VR experience. When you have a headset on you can much more easily get sucked into the world being presented, the scale feeling much more real life as opposed to large sprawling stages of traditional games. The tight spaces lead to tension and make you feel like you’re tight there, and there are some amazing segments in the game that I can see blowing away fans in VR. The section dealing with the Weeping Angels most striking of all. But in this new format they lack the punch that they would have in VR.
A cheap jump-scare doesn’t work sitting in front of my PC when I’m being led down linear path after linear path when I know it’s coming, but with a VR headset on I can just imagine shitting my pants when you hear that distinct Weeping Angels musical sting and actually whip around your space trying to find them so you can freeze them with a stare. Running through catacombs of Angels is a real nightmare, but far less so when you can simply zoom down the path at a sprint using WASD controls and the path being highlighted for you. Moments like these happen far too often and show that the team was looking for a quick port instead of taking the time to modify the game better for the new platform.
Imagine, now that you have such freedom of movement, if the team actually turned those catacombs into a real maze. If the team pulled an Amnesia and forced you to take it very slow and using audio clues to avoid the Weeping Angels. It would have been so incredibly tense if you made it a stealth section and when you come across an Angel it would continue to follow you throughout if you aren’t looking at it. Hell, I would pay for a game like that, especially right around Halloween. Instead, Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality takes the VR section, which I’m sure is scary as hell, and strips away any tension by letting you casually run down the fixed path.
Time and time again these sorts of things happen. You are plopped in a very tight and sectioned off area and you walk about lazily collecting things The Doctor tells you to collect. I simply don’t feel like I’m playing a Doctor Who game, rather, like I’m taking part in a boring Doctor Who ride at Universal Studios. When you sit down to play a PC game, especially and adventure one of this nature, you want something a bit deeper. You want a story and a purpose. Instead, you feel like your parents left you in the McDonald’s PlayPlace to fend for yourself while your cheeseburger got cold. It’s all a real shame because, like I stated before, I can really see what the developers were trying to do and how it would have worked far better in VR.
I really, really, wanted to love Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality, even after finding out that it was a pretty straightforward port of the VR game. Adventure games of this nature are few and far between and I simply love the genre. I imagined that the team could make just enough tweaks to give PC players a full-fledged adventure experience, but instead we get something that feels like a fan project. Still, it’s not all bad as there are a lot of things to like in this neutered VR experience.
For one, the sound design and voice-over work is pretty great. It’s a shame that The Doctor is mostly a floating hologram head that talks at you, but her voice work is fine as she feels like her character from a narrative perspective. The inclusion of the 10th Doctor is a real shame though as his voice-over work is through the roof. David Tennent sells The Doctor like he truly loves the character and wants just one more go at it. When he pops up its a real treat and the one time I got sucked into what I was doing. Jodie Whittaker does a well-enough job, and I love her as an actress, but the voice delivery feels a little flat, something you can blame on the direction, if anything. I think a lot of this has to do with us interacting with her as a floating hologram head more than as a real person. Still, while Number 10 is great, his role in the game is minutes long. It’s so short that it almost feels wrong sticking him on the box at all. It’s a glorified cameo video at best.
The writing at least is pretty darn good for an epic Doctor Who episode. It deals with the creation of the first being of the universe about how it has grown and changed throughout history, ending up becoming this mother who hates what her children have become and wanting to end all of reality and start again. It’s a proper big story that pulls a lot of fan-favorite baddies into the mix. Cybermen, Daleks, the whole lot. Essentially, the characters even the most casual of Doctor Who fan would know about. There is even this neat little action section that has you inside a Dalek and taking out other Daleks as you work to complete your mission. Sure, it would work much better in VR, but it was nice to mix up the standard walking around empty stages doing VR-focused puzzles.
That said, a lot of the goodwill the game builds up at times often falls away considering the glitches the game throws at you. Because it’s a VR game ported over, you will constantly clip through items and objects. There were sections where parts of the stage forced themselves onto the top layer of the scene making for some fun and very weird glitches. There was a point where I could see part of the Tardis on the top layer of the screen anytime I looked in its direction, even when multiple walls and objects obstructed it. Other times you can easily clip outside the world if positioned too close to a wall.
Puzzles sometimes fail even if you do everything right (I’m calling out piloting the Tardis here as the Simon Says puzzle is glitched) and there are times the audio of The Doctor plays on a loop even if you aren’t near where it’s meant to trigger. This means you’ll enter an area and immediately trigger The Doctor saying something that happens later on down the path. She will simply repeat the request over and over as you work you way toward the specified trigger point. It’s incredibly jarring at times and disorientates you, making you think you are in a wrong part of the games world. Then there was the time a puzzle flat out broke and nearly ruined my entire evening.
There is a section of the game where you have to do some good old fashioned book burning to access the next area. The trick is simple enough: you collect some books that match a certain photo and burn them in a specific order. It’s a simple puzzle, but if you burn the wrong book you fail. The game will then reset the books so you can collect them again and try the puzzle once more. On my first attempt I simply burned the books willy-nilly hoping to get lucky, and screwed up the puzzle after the second book. But instead of resetting the puzzle, the game only reset the two books that I managed to burn correctly. I spent the next hour looking for the other two books to no avail. It was a game breaking fail on a puzzle a lot of people will screw up on the first time round.
This was quickly followed up in the next section with your companion robot thing saying “It’s over 9000!” in regard to a power source you activated. I was not expecting to hear a very dead meme be thrown out in 2021, especially one so out of date than even the most ardent nerd defender of Doctor Who would be embarrassed by. I felt the cringe crawl up my back thinking about how someone on the development team had to okay the line, while someone else has to ask a professional voice artist to say them. I hope the amount of cringe they released into the world keeps them up at night.
The graphics are also sub-par for even a AA game in 2021. I understand the design and look, and I don’t hate it as it’s pretty amazing in parts, but it looks like an HD PS2 game at best most of the time. Again, in VR this would not be an issue as you lose some fidelity when using some lower-end headsets with their weird aspect rations and with the varying power of whatever headset you are using. If I was playing this on something like the PlayStation VR system it might even look pretty good. Unfortunately, looking at it on a big, curved, widescreen monitor you really notice how it looks kinda bad. It’s more Toon-Town Doctor Who than serious TV Doctor Who. It’s also a pretty dark game in terms of lighting, something that makes sense in VR but not so much in a normal game where you can clean things up.
And worst of all is that the world itself is incredibly lifeless. There are no NPC’s milling about anywhere in the game in any of the areas and times that you explore. No one to interact with or work alongside. Characters are either in some stasis pod that talk to you but don’t move, or you talk with the companion that The Doctor fused into your brain, like some kind of jerk. And, as mentioned before, The Doctor herself only pops up in the Tardis as a floating head from the game REZ. All of this might be excused in VR where you are the character and actively moving and doing things, but when you are sitting at a PC, it just feels like you are on a Doctor Who ride as a mostly passive participant.
This is all a shame as I’m sure Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality works really well in VR. I’m positive fans would love the experience and doing basic tasks and completing really easy puzzles for and with the help of The Doctor. But when you strip away the VR gimmick that the game was based around, all you are left with is a really simple adventure title with elementary school level puzzles, with low stakes for the player, nothing to fear, and an empty world to explore. It’s not the worst Doctor Who game by any means. Hell, It could even be the best one ever made if played in VR, but as it stands it’s the most okay Doctor Who game you can currently get your hands on.
Hopefully, the development team gets the chance to make a proper PC adventure title because the story is the standout star here. You play Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality and are just left wanting a game worthy of the interesting story being told. You want to be able to do more and engage with those parts of the show that everyone loves. Flipping some knobs and switches to make the Tardis go someplace is neat in VR, but not so fun when all I’m required to do is click said knobs and, well, nothing else really. If you are a fan I suggest trying to play this one in VR to get the best experience and to stay away from this lifeless port. And if you are an adventure game fan in general avoid this one at all costs. So, with that said Doctor Who fans will continue to wait for a good video game based on their beloved series.
Final Score:
*A review code was provided by the publisher*
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