WIRE Buzz: Doctor Who gets VR game, Disney details Galaxy’s Edge app perks

The Doctor Who universe is expanding, and the newest project for one of science fiction’s most vaunted worlds is promising, hands down, to give fans their most immersive ride in the TARDIS yet. 

BBC and game developer Maze Theory have just revealed Doctor Who: The Edge of Time — a new, feature-length VR experience heading to game platforms this fall. The interactive story will follow players as the Thirteenth Doctor (that’s right, Jodie Whittaker’s starring in this game!) on a space-and-time-hopping journey to fix a viral threat by recovering “a series of powerful time crystals that can repair spacetime and ultimately save the universe itself,” according to the BBC.

The brief trailer doesn’t spoil much for sure — but it does give us a nice idea of how faithful the creators appear to be staying to Doctor Who in its current TV incarnation:

Far from a mere interactive hand-holding walkthrough of a story, the developers are playing up the interactive bits by rolling out the conflict you’ll battle through with some iconic series baddies. 

“Armed with the iconic Sonic Screwdriver, players will solve mind-bending puzzles, grapple with classic monsters and encounter new horizons in a quest to find the Doctor and defeat a powerful force that threatens to destroy the fabric of reality,” BBC teased, adding that fans will definitely encounter “the infamous Daleks and other known faces from the Doctor’s universe plus some brand-new never-before-seen monsters.”

What’s really cool is that, unlike the upcoming Season 12 of the show itself, we actually know when the game will be arriving — and it’s arriving first. Doctor Who: The Edge of Time is warping onto PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest, HTC Vive, and Vive Cosmos this September.

Disney's Galaxy’s Edge parks are set to open soon with an enormous barrage of fans just forcing themselves to be patient for a turn at role playing in the Star Wars universe. Now, Disney is revealing more about the way guests will use their smart devices inside the parks to help navigate their way through the Galaxy’s Edge storyline. 

With interactivity one of the key features set to follow guests around every moment they’re inside Galaxy’s Edge, exploring the planet of Batuu will be a self-guided affair thanks to the Play Disney Parks mobile app, which will serve up a Star Wars Datapad that opens the entire park up for role-playing-style investigation — even when you aren’t riding the Millennium Falcon.

Among the at-your-leisure tools the app hands guests is a “hacking” feature that allows you to “interact with certain door panels or droids to see their memories,” according to Disney. There’s also a “scanning” tool that’ll allow you to carry out covert ops by stealing a glimpse into the contents of “cargo crates you may spot while walking around.” 

Not fluent in Aurebesh, the lingua franca of the Galactic Empire? No problem — just dial up the “translation” tool so you can decode all the directional signage that guides the way through Black Spire Outpost. “[Y]ou can even tap into and decrypt signals from antennas or communications devices and listen to secret messages with the ‘tuning’ feature,” Disney adds.

Disney appears to be taking no detail for granted in the Star Wars canon, even commissioning John Williams to compose an entirely new five-minute score that’ll greet visitors to the galaxy far, far away. We can almost hear the music now.

Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge opens at California’s Disneyland on May 31, and at Walt Disney World in Orlando this August.

Finally, one of the richest and most storied of Japanese fantasy video game multiverses is about to cross over to our shores for a new line of evergreen comic books and manga. Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts developer Square Enix has just announced a new publishing partnership that will begin churning out new English-language graphic novel series based on classic games like those, and many more. 

Anchored from the start by the newly revealed graphic novel Final Fantasy XV: The Dawn of the Future, the new comics deal with Penguin Random House Publisher Services will also debut with a handful of other new titles: Hi Score Girl, already adapted into a Netflix anime; A Man and His Cat, a “pet-themed comedy” that sold like hotcakes last year in Japan; and — in a big score for series fans — the complete edition of the Soul Eater manga series.

Already hugely successful with these and similar manga titles in Japan, the new agreement essentially brings the English-speaking world on board mid-stream in Square Enix’s ongoing rollout of fresh, mostly game-oriented comics. For a video game refresher of where we’ll be picking things up, check out Final Fantasy XV for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC; and Kingdom Hearts 3 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.