Doctor Who - Lost in Time

About a week ago it was brought to my attention that there was a new Doctor Who game on the block. Although most of the comments that I had seen were along the lines of “ugh, micro transactions!”

I suspected that maybe this wasn’t actually a new game, and was the one that is built around NFTs. It turns out that this wasn’t exactly new, as it had a soft launch last year, but it wasn’t the one involving purchasing a receipt of a jpeg so I decided to check it out.

Doctor Who: Lost in Time is an idle game for mobile. This was great news for me, as over the past year I have found myself enjoying idle games like PokéClicker (until it got too grindy and I dropped it) and AdVenture Capitalist, plus my patience with Niantic over Pokémon GO is basically non-existent at this point so I’m up for any excuse to leave that behind.

The gameplay loop of Lost in Time is you unlock a location, which are known as Waypoints, and that location starts to generate energy. This energy can then be reinvested into the Waypoint to increase the amount of energy it generates, and eventually enough energy will be generated to unlock the next Waypoint.

Each Waypoint has a timer determining when energy can be collected, initially ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes, but increasing to around an hour later on. Collecting energy has to be done manually, and more energy will not be generated until doing so, but it is possible to purchase an upgrade to automatically collect it, which means the game can bank energy while the player is away.

These automatic upgrades are tied to Characters that can be collected. Once unlocked, the player will be able to collect cards for their characters, and having enough of these cards - as well as some other currency that is dependent on which event is being played - can upgrade these characters to provide multipliers.

Upgrading Sarah Jane increases the energy produced in the Dalek City Waypoint.

Most character multipliers simply boost the energy in the Waypoint they are tied to, but some can provide boosts to all Waypoints. A few are capable of charging the TARDIS, which can boost the number of rewards received after completing an episode.

The story progresses in the form of episodes, and each episode requires a certain number of objectives to be completed. Objectives can vary from collecting a certain amount of energy, upgrading characters or Waypoints, or spending amounts of various currencies. Each objective completed rewards a Kerblam box that opens to give character cards and currency.

There are 3 objectives active at any one time during an episode. Completing these lights up one of the episode progress boxes.

Starting a new episode resets the Waypoints and puts them in different configurations. One episode may start at UNIT, but another may end with it. I’ve seen people complain about their progress being “lost”, but this is how idle games work - get to a certain point, start over but receive small boosts each time a reset happens.

Some complaints I have seen around lost progress are because people can spend real money buying currencies used in upgrades, although Character and Waypoint upgrades carry over from one episode to the next. The only case where this doesn’t happen is during events, but the purpose of events is to progress far enough to unlock rewards to bring over to the main story (character cards and currencies), so nothing is actually really lost unless a purchase is made close enough to the end of the event that it won't be possible to reach the next reward tier. At that point I'd argue that players are at fault, because there are timers clearly stating how long is left.

Having played several 24 hour events, and a 4 day long one, it doesn’t seem possible to be able to reach the final rewards tier without spending money or viewing ads. Viewing ads applies a temporary boost to energy generation, but without doing that or spending, progression is typically stunted by having to wait 2 hours for a free Kerblam box to get more currency to upgrade Waypoints or Characters, and even then it may not provide enough.

In the latest 4 day event, without having spent any money, I was still 7 tiers below the final one and had only just unlocked the final location with just under 90 minutes to go.

During one of the 24 hour events, I did not receive any cards for a specific character that I needed to be able to automate a cash out. It didn’t occur to me until later that I may have been able to spend some currency to buy cards from a shop rotation, but I would then not have enough of the same currency to be able to upgrade those cards.

During a UNIT event, I didn't receive any Liz Shaw cards which were necessary for automating one of the Waypoints.

I like Lost in Time, and I think that a lot of the hate I've seen comes from people not really understanding what type of game this is, with some resentment towards this not being a “proper” game.

While this is apparently a reskin of sorts of other games put out by the publisher, there is clearly a lot of love of Doctor Who that has been put into this. There is a recency bias in the characters that appear, but it’s also gone pretty hard on the Third Doctor era with UNIT characters - which does make it a bit jarring that I’ve yet to see the Third Doctor make an appearance beyond an ID card.

The idea of having loot crates be Kerblam boxes is a stroke of genius. It is so obvious, but at the same time I guarantee that most people would never have thought of using them.

Mobile games get a lot of shit simply for the platform they are on, mixed in with hatred for micro transactions, and while there are occasional pop ups here to push players to spend money, it is a free game that cost money to develop. It’s no different from a YouTuber pointing out they have a Patreon.

I have yet to spend any money on this, and I also haven’t clicked to view any ads, just to see what it was like as a free experience and, beyond being unable to reach the later tiers in events, it’s good.

Of the recent releases, if you are looking for a Doctor Who game you can finish in a couple of hours, then get The Lonely Assassins. If you hate yourself and want to have an absolutely miserable experience, play The Edge of Reality. But if you want something you can boot up whenever you’ve put the kettle on to make some steady progress, Lost in Time is a perfect fit.