I guess the ratings and reputation of Phobos should have warned me, but some people really like this one and I was hoping I might have been one of them.  I was left deeply disappointed by this audio, however.  Something about the adrenaline junkie characters just rubbed me the wrong way - I found them very loud, tropey, and annoying. They're bad characters in a horror movie in a story that kind of had the sophistication of Scooby Doo.

I never bought this setting.  I feel like the idea of a story taking place in a theme park centred around adrenaline would be a lot more interesting but I didn't really feel like the audio brought me into it.  We have so few characters and none of them feel real to me, and the whole idea of the theme park seemed at odds with the snowy mountain setting and fear-based content.  The story just really doesn't seem to come together in a coherent way I could grapple with.

There's an interesting idea buried here all about a fear god feeding on these people but I found the execution of it all just terrible.  Sure, it winds up having the Doctor pull a Rings of Akhatan years before that episode was made, but the show does that moment so much better.  It's a cool moment here but it feels underplayed and everything else going on here leaves me feeling hollow.  It just takes us so long to get to anything I found interesting and not just this shallow mess.  I think that's why the Doctor's big moments in this story felt really underwhelming to me - they don't feel earned in a story that simply wasn't engaging with me.  I had trouble simply caring about this fear god when all the other characters feel entirely unnecessary for the story, nor do they get any real pay-off in the form of any sort of narrative arc.  Considering that the fear-god thing feels entirely abstract and in-personable as a main threat, I'm left feeling like this was kind of a waste of my time. From my experience, Phobos has serious narrative issues and deserves its relatively low grade.