Whovians don’t get a whole lot of video game adaptions. So when what few games do come our way, we flock to the opportunity to be one of those illustrious Companions no matter how brief our time is. Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality features the Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) with some timey wimey aid from the Tenth (David Tennant, a personal favorite of mine). The game touts classic Doctor Who villains and a world-saving first person adventure. How could a Whovian like myself pass up the opportunity to live out this fantasy?Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality first appeared as a VR experience called The Edge of Time. It promised a brief three-ish hours aiding the Doctor in their fight against the Reality Virus, now repackaged for non-VR players to experience. Daleks, Cybermen, and Weeping Angels all make appearances. I love these baddies (Handles is the best Cyberman ever, fight me) which makes what I am about to say about this version heartbreaking.It is not good. At least this part gave me a good chuckleDoctor Who: The Edge of Reality – Second Verse, Worse Than the FirstFor starters, The Edge of Reality opens with me in a laundromat. I presume I’m supposed to tend to my laundry, so I pick up a basket and try to switch the load over to the dryer. That does nothing. There are no audio or visual cues for me to go off. I try interacting with things. Machine doors will glow white if I can interact with them but all I can do is open/close. Now I’m randomly mashing square on everything. I try both doors, the notices and photos, still nothing. That’s when I finally notice a speaker just below the board that I can interact with and the Doctor speaks to me. The room now has black ooze dripping from the walls of machines. The background audio drowns out whatever the Doctor is saying to me (I assume via the TV but there’s nothing on the screen) and thanks to my decades of gaming, I instinctively know I can go through the manager’s door now.The next room requires finding clues to open the safe and retrieve Thirteenth’s sonic screwdriver. One was fairly easy to locate but for some reason I wasn’t finding the other half of the code. A video walkthrough showed me where that clue was in the VR version. For some bizarre reason the item with the clue was changed for this version but not the number itself. Even once I had unlocked the safe and collected the sonic, Thirteen kept cycling through the same two audio clips about finding the code and what her (then current) companions were up to.In the VR version of the game, I should have walked outside and immediately encountered a radio. Not here. Stumbling my way without any guidance past some surveillance Daleks, I moved a bus. Eventually I wandered within range of a radio that I couldn’t find. The game is so incredibly dark that I wasted ten minutes trying to get through the shipping container maze. That was the end of my first session. I decided after a night of decent sleep to try again. With a new game, I repeated most of those steps. This time I found where the second clue had moved to before unlocking the safe. Same audio issues with cycling clips and bad mixing that is a trademark of the television program. I retraced my prior path, located the radio, and cobbled together the transmitter to summon the TARDIS.The straw that broke my back was trying to interact with the TARDIS control panel. Almost every single time I centered my reticle to focus on the switch or button I wanted to push, said switch or button would not highlight. This made attempting timed puzzles impossible to do. My love of Doctor Who could not compel me to play another minute of this game. It feels like an extremely lazy conversion from VR to console game. It’s sloppy, frustrating, and for three hours of this mess, not worth the download in its current state.Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality review code provided by publisher. Version 1.07 reviewed on a PlayStation 5. For more information on scoring please see our Review Policy.0.0 At least they got Jodie Whittaker and David Tennant to voice their Doctors There’s only a Master Audio toggle so you’ll need to turn on subtitles Targeting with the reticle inside the TARDIS is not accurate It’s just a terrible and broken port of the VR game
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