Pitching a short story as an emotionally invested piece of interactive fiction is a tricky balancing act. With one hand, you are marketing the brevity of it as a selling point, whereas the other hand tries to entice you in with a compelling story that usually requires time to get invested in. This is the dilemma of A Doctor’s Term, a curious mixture of walking simulator and visual novel segments that has multiple endings depending on your in-game choices. Its main question is how far would you go to support an uprising?
You play as a doctor in the first person, who has recently joined a heavily security-controlled health department for the government. There are hints of unrest and an uprising, and your job as a doctor is anything but normal. You are presented with a giant machine and three wards to the north, west, and east of you. In each ward is a subject that requires medical treatment, but you’ll administer it remotely using your giant machine and then observe the results. A patient may get better, or they may deteriorate, and reject “ejection” from the facility.
Over the course of half an hour, you’ll make choices on who gets what medicine, which patients to observe, and how to interact with your wife and son in between medical assessments. These all form short, sharp interactions with weighty choices at the end of each. The game implies that as you learn more about the moral grey area of your work, you may sympathise with your patients and want to join the uprising to rescue them. That comes at the risk of your life and potentially the safety of your family. It is a great setup, with a couple of endings to find depending on your choices. The atmosphere is dystopian, the voice acting is passable, and the writing hints at bigger topics and tensions with ease.
The flipside of this is that each scene is brief and kept at surface-level tension. You aren’t able to dig deeper into the emotional layers of keeping your wife in or out of the dark, but are instead presented with the choice, and that’s it. The worst crime A Doctor’s Term commits is being intriguing enough to want to spend more time with it, and that’s no bad thing.
Ultimately, the brevity of A Doctor’s Term is a double-edged sword. If you want a story where you can explore moral grey areas and their outcomes in an hour of choices-matter gameplay, then it’s a good pick up. For me, this hints at a bigger world that I’d love to explore more deeply in a related follow-up where the same principles and gameplay setup are followed with a deeper narrative and more nuanced branching story paths. I believe this game may have started off as a college project and developed from there, so I hope an expanded sequel is on the cards. Short, but sweet.
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