Doctor Who: 10 Things The 2021 Video Game NEEDS To Be Great

4. A Time Travel Game Mechanic

Doctor Who Twice Upon A Time time vortex
BBC Studios

One of the most important things a licensed game can do is to utilise the unique traits of the franchise it's adapting. After all, the people buying this game will already be fans of Doctor Who, so they'll be expecting as much "Doctor Who-ness" as possible.

And since Doctor Who is a time travel show, this is something that the game should use. The easy thing to do would be to just build the game's story around a time-hopping adventure, but what we'd really like to see is some sort of time travel game mechanic.

Maze Theory could do all kinds of crazy things with this idea. How about randomly scattering time corridors around a level, and when you jump in them, you get zapped forwards or backwards in time, and your environment changes appropriately? For example, if you go backwards, then the finished building you were once in becomes a construction site, changing the way you approach puzzles and enemy encounters.

Or how about giving players a vortex manipulator, so that when they die, they can jump backwards and try again? Alternatively, said manipulator could be used to go forwards, allowing you to "age" your enemies to death. As long as the device has a cooldown, abilities like this wouldn't make the game too easy, and they would just be tons of fun.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!