Tara McCauley October 13th, 2020 - 3:12 PM
In the midst of the ongoing “Time Lord Victorious”, a multimedia exploration of untold stories of the Tenth Doctor, BBC announced Doctor Who: Edge of Reality. The PC and console game that will unite David Tennant’s (Doctor Who, Good Omens) beloved Tenth Doctor with the current Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker (Doctor Who, Broadchurch). According to Digital Spy, Doctor Who: Edge of Reality serves as a follow-up expansion of the VR experience Doctor Who: Edge of Time released last year.
The teaser trailer for Edge of Reality, released at the end of this past weekend’s virtual New York Comic Con panels, features voice-over from Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor. Players will be able to take on the role of one of the Doctor’s companions as they’re “guided by the Thirteenth Doctor during the game, which features brand new monsters to fight, worlds to explore and puzzles to solve” (Digital Spy). However, Thirteen is not the only Doctor aboard the mission because, as with many special episodes of Doctor Who, sometimes it takes more than one Doctor to stave off a particularly catastrophic event.
The glitches prevalent in the opening shots of the trailer indicate the threats to reality that players will help both Doctors to resolve. Digital Spy describes the player’s mission is to “set out on a quest to save reality from a series of time-breaking glitches.” This gameplay mechanic has fans theorizing that the time glitches may be the reason that the Tenth and Thirteenth Doctors get thrown together. Screen Rant assures that “considering the elements of both time travel and reality shifting often deployed by the franchise, the added Doctor will certainly make sense in the end.”
The teaser indicates that Tenant’s Tenth Doctor is far from the only piece of iconic Doctor Who lore to be found in Edge of Reality. Profiles of three fearsome Doctor Who foes – the Weeping Angels, the Cybermen and the Daleks – loom ominously over Whittaker’s voice-over. Digital Spy teases that “more enemies [have] yet to be revealed”, giving fans plenty to look forward to upon the game’s spring 2021 release. Screen Rant speculates that these additions to the VR exclusive Edge of Time “will likely stretch [Edge of Reality] on longer than the original’s two-hour runtime.”
Edge of Reality’s availability on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and Steam invites more fans into the action, as the VR version was less accessible to a wide audience. In fact, Doctor Who: Edge of Reality will mark one of the long-running BBC sci-fi series biggest forays in the realm of video game to-date. As Screen Rant point’s out “[The Doctor] and his many companions have had more than a few ventures into the world of video games, but none of those releases have truly breached into the mainstream consciousness.” Lego Dimensions marks one of the more mainstream titles featuring Doctor Who characters as part of the story, but in Edge of Reality fans will get a story more aligned with the art and style of the television show itself.
View this post on Instagram
Perhaps having Tenant on-the-mind, BBC teased fans with yet another addition to the world of Doctor Who games with the mobile puzzle game Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins, which will explore the lore of one of the Tenth Doctors most daring adventures “Blink”. The Stephen Moffat (Doctor Who, Sherlock) penned episode first introduced audiences to the Weeping Angels, who quickly became a favorite monster amongst Whovians. In the iOS, Android and Switch game Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins, players will find a lost phone “which seems to be linked to a series of sinister events at uninhabited house Wester Drumlins” (Screen Rant). Doctor Who fans know this location well as it was central to the suspenseful events of the 2007 episode “Blink”.
In Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins, Ingrid Oliver (Doctor Who, Watson & Oliver) will join Tenant in returning to the Doctor Who franchise in game form as her character, Petronella Osgood, guides players through unlocking the origins of the Weeping Angels. Osgood’s first appeared onscreen in Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary special The Day of the Doctor and is known for a wardrobe inspired by past Doctors. When fans first met Osgood she sported an oversized multi-colored scarf emblematic of the Fourth Doctor played by Tom Baker (Doctor Who, Little Britain) and she’s later seen in the series wearing a bow-tie, a fashion item the Eleventh Doctor often proclaims “cool”. The teaser trailer for Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins shows a brief clip of Osgood in her question-mark collared shirt, which pays homage to Sylvester McCoy’s (Doctor Who, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey) Seventh Doctor and she also refers to the Doctor as “a friend” (trailer).
Between Doctor Who: Edge of Reality and Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins, Whovians will have plenty to sink their teeth into in spring 2021 while they await resolution of season 12’s cliffhanger that left the Thirteenth Doctor trapped in a Judoon prison.
