Doctor Who and the Dalek Super-Brain

I'm surprised this one has no review yet, I think this is the most fun jkj yuio game I've played so far.

It's a direct use of Dr Who characters and lore. You play as the doctor, with companion Bex, who only appeared in an audio drama (unless the name is a coincidence). You've accidentally teleported into a Dalek base and need to get out.

The game is a light snack, a thirty minute adventure with few puzzles and mostly exploration. The Daleks here are powerful but not the strongest they've ever been, lacking some core skills they've had in other adaptations.

The 3d models jkj yuio makes look a lot better in this than before, you can tell his skill is increasing. I think the mechanical nature of much of the scenery in the game helps with that, but also the faces are less uncanny-valley.

Overall, I enjoyed this. Is it because it relies heavily on a media franchise I like or because of the author's own merits? Maybe both; I feel like the author's enthusiasm for Dr Who led to a strong effort. In any case, this doesn't take very long to play, so it's worth checking out.

As my review of Dream of Silence indicates, I’m maybe not especially good at evaluating fan-fiction riffing on stuff I lack much direct experience with. Unlike with Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ve at least seen a bit of Dr. Who – I watched the Christopher Eccleston season of the rebooted show, and like three or four stories an ex showed me from the classic show – but it’s still a trivial percentage of a media franchise that’s been around for more than half a century at this point; if I’d seen only one season of Voyager and like three episodes of the original series, I’d feel on uncertain ground assessing how well a fan-game captured the Star Trek experience, and I’m in worse shape here since classic Dr. Who is also a quintessentially British phenomenon.

With that said, Dr. Who and the Dalek Super-Brain certainly seems like an authentic tribute to the show. The Daleks are presented lovingly, for one thing, with attractive 3D models and an endearing combination of ruthlessness and Self-Defeating Evil Overlord behavior. And the scenario, with its series of cliffhanger death-traps and fuzzily-explained time travel techno-babble, seems of a piece with what I know of the old series: after finding your time-ship blown off course, you’re kidnapped by the Daleks and your companion Bex is threatened with extermination if you don’t cough up the secrets of time travel to these tinpot Hitlers, after which you’ve got a chance to turn the tables through judicious application of the sonic screwdriver, logical paradoxes, and jury-rigged explosives.

This is all good clean fun, and if neither the narrative nor the prose ever rise above being workmanlike, well, I’m sure there were lots of weeks when Dr. Who was just phoning it in too. I did like the paradox bit – it’s set up as one of those classic 50s/60s scenarios where the protagonist tries to overload an android’s brain by spouting something nonsensical or self-contradictory, but here, after making the Dalek supercomputer consider one of the many paradoxes of time travel, the result isn’t to make it explode but rather to second-guess whether it truly understands time travel enough to build a working time machine from the info you’ve provided. But other than that, the companion is here to be rescued, the jaded leader of oppressed slaves is here to be inspired, and the Daleks are here to go down like punks – it all plays out exactly as you’d expect, which is the sign of a successful pastiche just as much as of a less-ambitious game.

The interface also contributes to the sense that there’s not much to do here. Things are purely choice-based, but with an opportunity to do a bit of navigation between different locations. While a nice bit of freedom in theory, in practice only one of the three or so rooms available at any given time will have anything you can usefully interact with, which makes the game feel emptier than it would if the choices were more restricted. Meanwhile, the visuals are pleasant but also led to a challenge or two, like the way a passage with various clickable links explaining potential upgrades for my screwdriver kept scrolling up and until I couldn’t actually reach the links anymore (this is the one real puzzle in the game, but fortunately it’s trivially solvable if you read at all carefully).

Speaking of the visuals, we need to address the elephant in the room, or rather the cantaloupes. From my admittedly small sample size, my sense is that Dr. Who is a relatively sexless show. So I experienced a bit of ludonarrative dissonance from the fact that almost the first graphic the game presented to me was a slightly-zoomed in shot of Bex’s chest, with most of her head cropped out of the frame and her zipper pulled down to reveal quite a lot of cleavage. The text itself doesn’t sexualize Bex, beyond the patriarchy-mandated trope of restricting her role to being menaced by aliens and having the plot explained to her, so I don’t think this is an intentional decision to try to make horny Dr. Who. The cleavage could just be because the author was looking for free or low-cost 3D models of sci-fi looking women, and maybe the cast from an off-brand Fallout sex game was all that was on offer; meanwhile, I think the cropping-out of her face was just due to how I had my browser window set up. Still, it made for an off-putting and in-your-face combination; if the first thing a game thrusts at me is boobs, I kinda expect it to be about boobs, and it’s a nice bonus if the person the boobs are attached to has a personality.

This is a slight but fun choice-based game that heavily leans into its 80s Doctor Who aesthetic. Its strengths are the excellent graphics and the way the plot (such as it is) unfolds pretty much like a standard DW story - the daleks are up to sometime and it is up the you, The Doctor, to thwart their plans!

There is nothing wrong with a slight story but I feel that behind the slick interface and shiny graphics there is very little substance here. There is only one real puzzle, most of the runtime is taken up with talking to a few characters to unlock the next scene in a very linear fashion. Again, there is nothing wrong with this but the game has a certain lack of ambition that I found frustrating.

It is a shame, because there is a lack of Doctor Who related Int Fiction and Doctor Who and the Dalek Super-Brain is fun enough on the initial play through for fans of the show. I am not sure it stands alone for people unfamiliar with the premise.

Speaking as a fan, I do have to take issue with the cheesecake images of the companion. Classic Doctor Who was not exactly the most progressive show in its depiction of woman but it never stooped to busty babes bursting out of figure-hugging jump suits (well, maybe a couple of times, and also Peri, but apart from that almost never...) It makes the game feel a little juvenile.

I don't want to dissuade anyone from playing this game - despite my issues there is fun to be had and some nice scifi nonsense to enjoy.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Am I a Dr. Who fan? Kind of. I devoured the modern run through Capaldi, and have been bursty ever since. Am I a fan of classic Dr. Who? What even is that? This is a 60 year old property, what even is the classic Dr.? Ok, am I a fan of Dr. Who runs prior to the modern renaissance? Sure, my introduction to the property was through PBS replays of Tom Baker Dr, which was appointment TV back when we just called that 'tv'. Am I amenable to fan fiction Dr. Who works?

Hey, what’s with all the questions, is there a Dr. Who-based murder I’m implicated in, Lt. Columbo?

Fine, here’s my testimony. This is a fan work paying homage to 80’s Dr. Who. Yes, I knew the work of interest. From the start, something seemed just a little off about the implementation though. The immediate issue was its appearance. 80’s Dr Who had a very limited budget. Lots of indirectly lit sound stages, lots of special effects and set dressings straight from the craft store to screen. It was a transformational art-from-limitations example, the low-fi of its effects a chummy compact with the audience: ignore the pipe cleaners and spray paint, this is the story. More often than not the writing was strong enough, and unique enough on broadcast TV, to make that compact worthwhile. So much so, that the cheesy effects became a warm element of the experience.

In addition to really strong speculative storytelling, Baker set the mold with awkward, idiosyncratic, charismatic performances that conferred power of personality to the Dr. I am not Who scholar enough to know whether he was the FIRST oddball, but he certainly was among the most MEMORABLE, and it is his work that modern Dr’s so frequently riff on.

So if I were to identify the top three qualities of classic Dr it would be: embraceable yet laughable special effects; well constructed stories; and dynamic characters, particularly its central figure. This work fell short in all three dimensions for me.

Visually, it strikes a fairly generic cgi figure. So much sharper, so much brighter, yet with so much less personality than the Dr I knew. I don’t mean to open the ‘procedural art’ box here, because I suspect this is NOT that, but I can’t help but observe that it carries the same cold vibe as generated art. It certainly feels more of a piece to modern Dr., and even then carries more gloss. I will say the decision to smash-zoom into NPC faces when dialoguing with them was a novel, if deeply unsettling graphic choice. Woah Bex, personal space!!

The character of the Dr was probably the biggest miss for me. As a Twinesformer, with the player inhabiting the Dr, we spend our entire time with him, but at no point did I think he was anything other than a faceless IF protagonist, solving puzzles. Now I fully understand that doing a recognizable Baker pastiche is a truly Herculean task, but the ABSENCE of that attempt is no less noticeable against the goals of the work.

Which leaves story. The basic setup of Dalek machinations and time travel is pretty center of the road for classic Who, no notes on central conceit. Its application though, and mapping to very limited parser-style gameplay, felt more like a sketch than a completed narrative. In particular the decision to put the Dr under duress, (Spoiler - click to show)and fold, early in the game belied a lot of the protagonist’s legendary cleverness and really undermined his presence. The subsequent puzzle based developments were by contrast pretty simple, with the game basically ushering you along a path, and end-gaming you if you divert. Its fine, you just undo back, but its limited choice space really drives home how pre-defined the success path is. The MECHANICS of that path are very transactional - find/use/explore. None of it requires the Dr’s patented cleverness to accomplish. It was just too railed and shorthanded to really ring of its inspiration for me, and required too little of me (and the Dr!) to navigate it.

For me, I have enough connection to the work’s inspiration to have some forgiveness here. Even so, those three big things kind of kept me at arms length and never let it breach Mechanical. So you see, Lt Columbo, I couldn’t be the murderer… Was I bitter the work let me down so hard? That’s not what I said, Lieutenant… Where was I when this review was published?

I think this interview has taken a turn, Detective. Please refer future questions to my lawyer.

No! No ‘One More Thing…’! I’m locking the door!

Played: 10/4/24
Playtime: 20m, 3 fails undone, success
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless