Doctor Who and the Dalek Super-Brain by jkj yuio
I’m not sure what this game is trying to do, both in terms of tone and in terms of gameplay. Let’s start with the first. On the one hand, everything seems to indicate that this is a light-hearted sci-fi romp. The evil opponents are robots that look as if they were designed by the antagonist of Day of the Tentacle. One of the first things you say to your companion is: “You are from the '80s?” after which she smiles happily and starts naming her favourite bands. And you win the game by tricking a smart computer into thinking about time travel paradoxes. But, on the other hand, said companion is brutally tortured and murdered within five minutes of starting the game, and the only other human NPC is probably going to die from radiation poisoning after being forced to work with radioactive materials. I’m all for the juxtaposition of very different tonal registers; it’s exactly what I did in my two previous IFComp games. But it requires careful thought and attention to make it work, and it seems to me that Doctor Who and the Dalek Super-Brain just throws them together and doesn’t do anything to turn it into a coherent whole.
Moving on to gameplay, I’m unclear what the player is supposed to be doing. There’s some exploration, but there’s not much to find – the Dalek ship is basically empty, and the mine planet is extremely limited and linear. There’s a puzzle, but as far as I can see there’s no way to find out from the description of the technological objects which one is the right one, and so you’re reduced to just trying everything until you hit on the solution. And the final, climactic puzzle… is solved by the player character without any input from the player. A massive anti-climax.
The story also doesn’t make much sense. There’s some evil robots who want to time travel, and they steal this knowledge from me, but first their super computer needs to turn the ‘formula’ into… something, I have no idea, and then the evil robots let me loose right next to this supercomputer so I can go and sabotage it. But I think they still have the formula, right? So what’s going to stop them from working out time travel anyway? Given that I have time travel, they probably don’t even need a supercomputer to make it work. It doesn’t make any sense.
I have never seen any Dr. Who, so perhaps everything is much better if you go into this with the right background knowledge. But playing this game has certainly not made me more eager to watch the series.