The developer of 80 Days was once invited to pitch a Doctor Who game, but never heard back from the BBC afterward: ‘Technically, we’re still waiting for a reply’

80 Days may still be the best-known game from narrative maestros Inkle Studios. But the developer’s most ambitious game is probably Heaven’s Vault, a sci-fi archaeological adventure about piecing together an ancient alien language.

Phillippa Warr gave it an impressive score of 88 in PC Gamer’s Heaven’s Vault Review, stating it “does a beautiful job of letting you unlock a language, and thus a dialogue of sorts, with the past, via a wonderfully engaging protagonist.”

Yet had Inkle’s original plans come to fruition, Heaven’s Vault would have been quite a different experience. This was revealed in a Bluesky post by Inkle’s narrative director and writer Jon Ingold, where he stated that “Heaven’s Vault started out as a Doctor Who game”.

Ingold revealed the full story in an interview with Eurogamer, explaining how Inkle was approached by multiple organisations about working with their licenses following the success of 80 Days. “One of those was an approach from the BBC, who floated several different BBC properties for us to consider working on. As a lifetime Doctor Who fan, that was the one we jumped on.”

Inkle then spent roughly eight months working on a pitch called The Daedalus Effect. This game would have been set on “an asteroid on the edge of a black hole, where time dilation had you moving slowly / inexorably towards disaster” and would have featured an art style with “2D characters within a 3D scene for a comic-book look.”

The project actually went further than initial concepting, with Inkle building a prototype for moving around the TARDIS’ control room, as well as a “playable ‘fly through the vortex’ game for travel sequences.” It also prompted Inkle to rebuild its Ink engine, resulting in “the more modern version that we eventually open-sourced.”

Yet despite all this work, the BBC never got back to Inkle about the pitch, with Ingold remarking that “technically, we’re still waiting for the reply”. Yet rather than wait in Limbo, Inkle decided “to take the prototypes we’d built so far and repurpose them into something that we could make on our own.”

As Ingold mentions, you can see traces of Doctor Who within Heaven’s Vault, such as the relationship between protagonist Aliya Elara and her robotic sidekick Six, alongside the game’s interstitial space travel sequences, which Ingold says “developed pretty directly from the ‘time vortex’ imagery you see (mostly in the opening credits of) Who.”

Personally, I’m glad we got Heaven’s Vault rather than a Doctor Who tie-in game. Not just because of Heaven’s Vault itself, but because of all the wonderful original games Inkle has made since, like the musical platformer A Highland Song, and the reverse murder mystery Overboard!, the latter of which Inkle made in just three months.

Sure, a Dr Who game from Inkle may have been great too, but it also might have led the studio down a path of producing tie-in games rather than original works, which I think would have been a shame. Ingold himself isn’t sure what he’d do if the same opportunity came up today. “I still love the character and the wild variety the concept would bring. But there’s been a lot of Who games since 2014, and I feel like it’d be hard to capture the same excitement.”