Imagine an escape room where the decisions you make have real-world impacts on the people about whom you care, outside the room, wherever they are.

Imagine a handful of people of varying degrees of venality, vying for power and control in a situation fraught with tension, where the wrong decision could be catastrophic (Mm? What leadership contest?).

Imagine the famous “Trolley Problem” played out with real lives on the line, including your own, depending on the decisions you make?

Welcome to Torchwood – End Game.

The story, by seasoned writer of interactive experiences Tom Black, takes Toshiko Sato to a locked room thirty feet under Whitehall, with three government MPs of varying ages and degrees of self-serving pomposity (Frank Reese, Jasmine Jenning, and Gerard Marsh, played respectively by Greg Wise, Jolade Obasola, and Ed White), to play out a kind of war game disaster simulation including invading aliens (hence Tosh’s presence in the room).

Everything is fine until two things become clear. Firstly, they can’t get out until the simulation has run its course. And secondly, the decisions they make have those real-world impacts on members of their family – or even on themselves, stuck underground as they are.

That’s when the famous Trolley Problem – if you’re faced with only bad decisions which will cost lives, does contextual information sway your decision-making, or only the overall good of the largest number of context-agnostic people? – becomes a real, tense backdrop for a morality drama of tightly-drawn characters. 

From there, the whole thing clenches like a fist into hard choices. It becomes a question, like any escape room, of clear thinking even as the stakes ramp up and the decisions get bigger. The shift of mood throughout the piece, from the initial surface joviality without consequence through increasingly sweaty, claustrophobic and weighty decision-making is delivered very well by the small cast, with enough moral light and shade in the room to keep the whole thing from falling into button-pushing sentimentality or preaching, which it could have done, given the framework of the premise. 

What is actually going on in End Game only becomes clear towards the end, as Tosh and one other member of the party interrogate the system that is both keeping them prisoner, putting them through the ringer, and giving their actions their outlandish, seemingly impossible consequences. Until then, you’re cleverly kept just a little off balance as you try to understand whether what you’re hearing is a true record, and if it is, what is really going on and how. That means End Game delivers on its chills and shudders in a kind of Hunt For Red October, War Games way (Google it, or ask your nearest Generation Xer…). Uncertainty, sweat, tension, the snapping strings of human emotion, all knotted together tight in space, in time, and in consequence.

It becomes increasingly creepy over the audio’s runtime, and just as the group are trapped in the room, once you start End Game, the chances of you pausing it or stopping it to do anything else until it’s done with you are slim. While never exactly taking a back seat, Tosh allows the other egos in the room space to play, at least until it becomes apparent that people may very really die unless she steps in. She also faces her own Trolley Problem moment, as the simulation pits a bunch of government types against her Torchwood colleagues in the “Who do we allow to die” stakes, and while Tosh is never going to beg for her colleagues’ lives, she’s not above a little misdirection, manipulation, or flattery to get the outcome she wants.

The actual point of all of the terror and tension, when it’s revealed, is satisfyingly cynical in an entirely believable but still quite shocking way. Think of the reveal of the 456’s desires in Miracle Day and you’re on the right lines – aliens that will put you through the ringer for their own reasons, without any regard for what it costs you. That gives End Game a solid punch, and for a moment, both the drama and the fate of the world hinge on the character of the people in the room, in a way that resonates with recent TV Doctor Who story 73 Yards. Is there a Roger ap Gwilliam in waiting down in the bunker with Tosh? Or will there turn out to be someone who might, just possibly, give a damn about humanity? (Seriously, what leadership contest?)

We won’t spoiler it for you, but, as with some other Torchwood stories at Big Finish, End Game is a cogent and a pleasing reminder that people who only watched the TV version often underestimated Tosh’s resourcefulness and her ability to ensure that, if at all possible, she would crawl out of the rubble of situations that would have killed less determined and less mentally strong people. It’s another strand in the ever-expanding rope of understanding of what Tosh brought to the team, and what, if we’re lucky, she’ll keep bringing to the world of audio Torchwood for years to come. Tony Fyler

If you like what we do and want to help us keep the lights on and the podcasting mics warm, we’d appreciate it if you bought us a cup of coffee

Pre-order the Anti-Heros new album Devil At My Heels here