‘Doctor Who: The Edge of Time’ is the Most Broken VR Experience I’ve Ever Had – and I Kind of Loved It
I have never been terribly raucous about the potential for virtual reality (VR) games to pioneer the medium forward. But as chance would have it, I found myself purchasing a steeply discounted PSVR headset last winter. Having spent many an hour with beloved, expansive VR worlds in Bethesda’s Skyrim or Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky, I have grown accustomed to the uncanny blend of polished game worlds and questionable gameplay. VR comes with many quirks and janks, but I’ve never experienced a level of fundamental disconnect with a game until spending an evening with Doctor Who: The Edge of Time.
Admittedly, I’ve never walked away from any Doctor Who gaming experience with radiant and glowing feelings, earnestly recommending these games to other people. It might be a problem with the scope and scale of the established Doctor Who universe that causes these games to end up as bereft puzzlers with stilted, fanfiction-quality scriptwriting. And yet, I don’t think it’s an issue with trying to too-tightly pack the cosmos into a game, because so many Doctor Who episodes – both television and audio drama – that stand the test of time are in fact self-contained, compact stories. No games have adequately captured that feeling of Doctor Who, but there are fleeting moments in Doctor Who: The Edge of Time that enabled me to forget my critical lens, losing myself to the experience.
So much of the story conceits of The Edge of Time are forgettable that I’d prefer to focus on a few specific successes and failures of the game. One of the major failures of this VR experience is the actual interfacing with the world. The game starts you off trapped in a corrupted laundromat where menacing blobs are threatening to break out of the washing machines while the Jodi Whittaker’s Doctor coaches you through some environmental exploration. Unlike any game I’ve played in VR, I felt like objects were always out of my reach by a few more inches than I’d expect. These otherwise tense sections of needing to frantically search a desk by pulling out drawers and turning over papers lost their impact because of simple technical hitches.
These technical problems truly rear their head in sections where the Doctor asks you to fiddle around with the otherwise incomprehensible layout of the TARDIS controls. At first, I found myself running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to figure out what interface I was missing as the Doctor repeated the exact same line of instructions at me. Once I managed to sort out the confusion of activating the TARDIS systems, it became a clumsy logistical nightmare to actually perform the Simon Says sequences of button pressing and knob turning.
I was ready to abandon The Edge of Time without looking back at this point, but I knew that this game was relatively short, so I persisted a bit further than I might have if this weren’t Doctor Who. I found myself stuck in a building with an elevator behind me. This elevator opened up at the corner of two corridors, stretching into a dimly lit and foggy distance of an industrial brick interior. In order to get the elevator open and working again, you have to interact with a panel inside these hallways, where you will quickly realize a Weeping Angel is menacing at the far end. Doctor Who fans will be fully aware of the Weeping Angels’ lore and how the one thing you need to do when encountered is to keep looking at it without blinking. With two open corridors and only one set of eyes from which to aim my VR headset, this evolved from tedious puzzling to a deeply unsettling horror game.
After only 5 minutes of paranoid glances between corridors, waiting on the elevator to open back up, I was sweating, panting, yelping with terror. I had to take off the VR headset and take a few minutes away to calm down. I tried it again and immediately realized that this wasn’t going to stop; this was an entire building of Weeping Angel sequences of increasing difficulty. As someone who cannot deal with horror in any capacity, I jumped in a Discord voice call with my friends, screen sharing my fear to their delight.
My friends coached me through this Weeping Angel sequence, which took far longer than any of us would have anticipated. Unfortunately, the aforementioned jank of this VR experience caused me to repeat a few extra floors of the Weeping Angel building. I would find myself, for example, having to contort my arms behind my back, flailing wildly with the controllers, searching for the elevator’s lever to close the doors behind me. The problem with this sequence is that you have to keep looking at the Weeping Angels – sometimes multiple – while performing a task that would otherwise require you to physically turn around. As frustrated as this made me – forcing myself through multiple deaths and jump scares to boot – I came away from this sequence thinking that the developers created something truly special with their use of these Doctor Who villains. It was a sequence that could have only worked for the Weeping Angels specifically.
Despite the power of the Weeping Angel sequence in The Edge of Time, I was still prepared to write this off as a broken mess of an experience. However, words cannot capture the amount of glee that erupted from within me when I realized that I was going to play as a Dalek – or at least inside of one. There are some irritating stealth sequences leading up to this event in the story, but as soon as the Dalek shell encased my character and I was looking out of its iconically cycloptic eye, I finally bought into the power of VR.
Like Untitled Goose Game, this experience playing as a Dalek taught me that there is a certain joy in inhabiting a morally horrible character. The Edge of Time doesn’t ask you to perform magnitudes of evil that Daleks are actually capable of, but rather turns you against other Daleks and drone-like enemies. In essence, you can have the fun of shooting out laser beams and rolling around like you’re about to exterminate an entire planet without the moral guilt and expiation. Considering the Daleks are probably my favorite fictional species of all time, I realized in this moment that I would love to play a VR game entirely from a Dalek’s perspective. But of course such an experience would contravene much of the family-friendly precedent set by the Doctor Who franchise.
Ultimately, I can’t recommend The Edge of Time to anyone as a core Doctor Who experience, nor can I highlight it as a must-play for VR enthusiasts. Like many of the Doctor Who games before it, The Edge of Time fails to capture the character of the Doctor, the freedom of the TARDIS, and the diversity of the cosmos around them. Some die-hard fans will have a blast with the aforementioned Weeping Angel section and might be overtaken by childlike delight, as I was, by the Dalek scene – but as a story and as a game, there’s nothing bigger on the inside.
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