Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

“SEARCH FOR THE DOCTOR: DICE, DRAX AND DISAPPOINTMENT IN A DIMENSIONALLY DULL ADVENTURE”

Search for the Doctor, the first in the Make Your Own Adventure series from the late 1980s, should have been an exciting prospect—a Doctor Who gamebook penned by Dave Martin, one half of the duo behind classics like The Claws of Axos and The Three Doctors. With Colin Baker's Sixth Doctor as the nominal star and Time Lord lore baked in via returning characters like Omega and Drax, it sounds like a recipe for interactive fun.

Instead, it’s a frustrating mess.

The book tries something ambitious—mixing second-person, past-tense chapters (for the reader’s perspective) with third-person interludes focused on the Doctor and Omega. It’s rare and, on paper, adds a more personal layer to the experience. In practice, though, the heavy prose and technical exposition slow everything to a crawl. What should be a snappy, branching thrill ride becomes a sluggish slog through verbose worldbuilding.

K9, DRAX, AND A DOCTOR WHO’S BARELY IN IT

As the reader, you’re joined by two recurring characters: Drax, the lovable (or not) Cockney Time Lord from The Armageddon Factor, and K9, apparently bequeathed to you by Sarah Jane. Neither character is particularly engaging here—Drax leans more grating than charming, and K9 is mostly just there. Their involvement also varies wildly depending on your route through the book.

That’s a key issue: while the promise of multiple story paths is enticing, Search for the Doctor is structured so that only one path leads to success. Most choices lead to failure—sometimes personal death, sometimes the destruction of Gallifrey, or even the Doctor himself. The book delights in scolding you for your ‘wrong’ choices, but rarely makes clear what the ‘right’ ones are. Do you take the cautious route or the bold one? Doesn’t matter—you’ll probably fail either way.

A SCI-FI SLUDGE OF JARGON AND JUDGEMENT

Martin seems obsessed with sounding clever, packing the text with talk of antimatter, fission, black holes and all manner of technobabble. At times, it reads more like a physics textbook than a gripping sci-fi tale. The plot becomes increasingly incoherent the deeper you go—characters are forgotten, locations blur together, and at some point you realise you’ve stopped caring.

Who's FERN? Where is Drax now? What does Omega actually want? Why are we dealing with fusions, fissions, earthquakes and underwater bases all at once? There’s no clarity, no emotional weight, and no sense of urgency or direction.

And then there are the dice rolls. At first, they add a sense of unpredictability. But as the book progresses, they become maddeningly overused. Some sections require repeated rolls to proceed, as if Martin wants you to brute-force your way to his preferred outcome. By the end, it feels less like making your own adventure and more like trying to please an unreasonably picky dungeon master.

AN ADVENTURE WRITER WHO FORGOT THE ADVENTURE

It’s clear that Martin is more invested in his own creations than in the player’s experience. The few successful routes involve Drax, K9, and Omega in very specific ways, while the others are designed to punish you for straying from his chosen path. There's very little actual interest in you, the player character, or even the Doctor, who is often sidelined.

Set in 2056, the book tosses in some supposedly futuristic elements—the UK uses euros now!—but the settings don’t feel particularly vivid. There are jaunts through space, a visit to the Nevada desert, an underwater section, and some TARDIS time… but none of it lingers in the memory. The prose is too dense, the pacing too uneven, and the gameplay mechanics too rigid.

The most damning thing about Search for the Doctor is that it’s just not fun. The one successful path is buried under a pile of failures, the story is confusing and convoluted, and the cast—especially Drax—ranges from bland to insufferable. By the time you’re halfway through, you’re not making choices out of excitement anymore. You’re making them out of obligation.

📝VERDICT: 1.3/10

Search for the Doctor is a gamebook that doesn’t understand games or books. It punishes players for exploring, hides its single successful ending behind an avalanche of bad luck and arbitrary choices, and drowns everything in dull technobabble. The writing is dense, the characters unlikable, and the adventure—ironically—has very little to do with the Doctor. It’s a rare feat to make an interactive story feel this lifeless. Dave Martin, sadly, plays his own game and forgets to invite the reader along.