There are many, many dystopia games out there, but how each actually depicts its dystopia says a fair amount about its creators and the ideas it’s trying to express. In the case of A Doctor’s Term, there is clearly a dystopia being depicted, but exploring its nuances and the ideas behind it becomes…difficult.

Not for a lack of trying, though, don't get me wrong.

A Doctor’s Term is a walking simulator set in some far-off dystopia. You play as Dr. Batten, a doctor hired by the ministry of health, ostensibly to study sick patients, but in reality, to medically torture them and explore their psyches.

I say all this with a bit of assumption. While narratives are the soul of any walking simulator, A Doctor’s Term is so brief that its narrative doesn’t get time to breathe before it’s smothered by an ending. A third of the game’s playtime is devoted to a tutorial, which, given this is a walking simulator, is wholly unnecessary and serves only to detract from the rest of the setting and story. The narrative also suffers from poor writing and abysmal voice acting, making it, at times, difficult to figure out what the narrative is supposed to be. This, paired with the conventions of the genre and not expecting the game to only be half an hour long, make it difficult to get invested in the story for anything more than the fact that this is a dystopia, and I’m supposed to be invested based on that and that alone.

And yet, there’s still something weirdly compelling about A Doctor’s Term. Despite coming off like a student’s best attempt at making a full walking simulator over the course of a semestre - which, to be fair, it is - there are elements of the game that absolutely land, despite the voice acting’s best attempt to murder them.

Can't have a dystopia without grey!

Once the player makes it through the tutorial and enters the game proper, there comes a moment where the scale of the world-building and design become clear. Whatever the game lacks in its writing and voice acting and gameplay, it makes up for with its world design. Reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, the dystopia depicted in A Doctor’s Term is beautiful in its brutalist simplicity, conveying everything I need to know about the world in a few pillars. It’s a masterpiece of environmental storytelling, and I enjoyed just lingering in the space.

This brilliance in world design is further highlighted by the submaps and the ability to explore “patients’” psyches. Moving through a psyche and hearing voices fade in and out and watching the world change to reflect memories is an excellent experience and shows hints of the game this could have been, given a bit more time and investment. Instead, much like the memories themselves, once I move out of them, that game and that potential fades away, and I’m once again left with dire voice acting on a plain text screen.

But for a moment, there was a glimmer of something real in the dystopia that is A Doctor’s Term. There was the faint ray of hope for something more, and that ray of hope is worth clinging to.

Developer: Council of Pure Sanity
Genre: Walking simulator
Year: 2025
Country: Austria
Language: English
Time to complete: 30 Minutes
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/quqGoFfTZOI