Doctor Who has a weird relationship with video games. Firstly, there’s very few of them. Secondly, the games that actually end up being released are usually not very good. (Although, Edge of Reality is pretty decent.)
As it turns out, one Doctor Who game was in development by Inkle, the team behind 80 Days and the new visual novel murder mystery game Expelled were working on an official doctor who adventure game in 2015.
Revealed in a recent post on Twitter, and then expanded on in an interview with Eurogamer, the game would’ve featured Peter Capaldi’s Doctor and compansion Clara Oswald in a devastating time-loop that gave players 16-minutes to journey into the TARDIS and escape from an asteroid being sucked into a black hole.
Dubbed Doctor Who: The Daedalus Effect, this mobile-first adventure game eventually became Heaven’s Vault, revealed designer Jon Ingold. Following the massive success of 80 Days, the BBC approached the team to use one of its IPs for a new title. “[They] floated several different BBC properties for us to consider working on. As a lifetime Doctor Who fan, that was the one we jumped on,” Ingold revealed.
The designer explained that the team spent eight months designing the adventure with a large number of paths all designed around the 16-minute time loop “where time dilation had you moving slowly/inexorably toward disaster”.
During the game’s eight months of development, the team rebuilt their in-house ink engine, crafted a TARDIS interior, and even designed a Time Vortex mini-game where players could fly the iconic blue box. Unfortunately, after all this work, the BBC simply never replied to the team regarding the project’s continued development.
“Technically, we’re still waiting for a reply,” Ingold told Eurogamer, before revealing the project was dropping as they “needed to start work on something” that could actually be released. As a result, all of the engine and design work for Doctor Who ended up being used for Heaven’s Vault.
While the team is very happy with the games its made since then, Ingold explains that “he Daedalus Effect would have been an excellent game: we had a really strong core concept. But the creative freedom of working on our own world was terrific, and we were able to push our story in a lot of different and unusual directions without asking permission, and that really let it fly.”
Additionally, after a decade, there’s still a wish to work with the Doctor Who property, although the developer explained “it’d be hard to capture the same excitement as we felt for the project when we first pitched it.”
Doctor Who is an incredible vast property, and it should be a fantastic property for all manner of video games, but it’s still a very underserved IP. We should see dense visual novels, horror games and Professor Layton style adventures in the universe constantly, but it’s very rarely been allowed into the video game format. (And when it does, it usually ends in disaster. Return to Earth and The Eternity Clock, anyone?)
