Doctor Who and the Dalek Super-Brain

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.