Jekyll & Hyde Review

In the latest Jekyll & Hyde from The Adventure Company (there in fact was another almost ten years ago, completely unrelated to this one), the parties concerned have once again tried to concoct a computer game that will appeal to both action and adventure gamers. And, like so many countless others before them, they swing wildly and miss. J&H is about 70 percent an action platformer with some exploring and puzzles and traditional adventure-game inventory activities shoehorned in between. It’s hard to envision either the adventure or action camps embracing it wholeheartedly.

Poor Dr. Henry Jekyll has his hands full in late Victorian London trying to concoct a cure in his lab for a mysterious epidemic ravaging the city. Unfortunately, he instead develops a serum that transforms him into a Yeti in a ripped suit, Mr. Hyde. A minute later he falls down the well is his backyard and uncovers a vast cavern system filled with enormous statuary and man-traps apparently built by the ancient Greeks, or maybe the ancient Greek gods themselves.

So, Dr. J, the dedicated scientist and clinician that he is, decides to explore this new hidden world in the hopes it will cough up the vaccine he needs. Which is to say that not only does Jekyll & Hyde not have very much, if anything, to do with the famous Robert Louis Stevenson novella, it doesn’t even have much to do with its own extended backstory and intro. What you really get is a cave crawl and a variation on the Marvel comic the Incredible Hulk.

Dr. J, trusty torch in hand, handles all the puzzles while Mr. H shows up for most of the action sequences. Both characters are controlled in third-person view by the keyboard (with an option for mouse control or game controller) There’s an inventory where Dr. J can occasionally combine things or blend new potions, but largely this is a game of exploration, running, jumping and dodging. Which would be fine, if only it worked.

By far the biggest downfall of J&H is the character controls, and to a lesser extent the game engine. The game utilizes something called PhysX by Nvidia. Perhaps this is some modern technical marvel, but for me it boiled down to the entire game world lurching around drunkenly every time I tapped a direction key.

Worse, the camera angle often changes dramatically and without warning. Usually when you’re trying to run away from something. You’ll be dashing for an open doorway straight ahead when, bang, the camera angle swings around and suddenly you’re pitching yourself headlong over a fiery chasm. Thank you very much, Mr. Game Engine.

Even worse is the character controls. Sometimes the jump key works. Sometimes not. Sometimes you need to hit it three steps before the cliff edge. Sometimes two steps. Sometimes one step. Have fun experimenting! Also, the directional keys usually only turn the character 90 degrees. So if you want to jump off a cliff at a 45-degree angle, tough luck. You have to spend a minute or two shimmying the character around to get him in position. This is bad enough when you’ve got plenty of time, but later in the game you’re going to be dodging lightning bolts while attempting this. I once spent about five minutes and about a dozen “respawnings” just trying to get Dr. J to jump over a simple two-foot wide gap.

Oh, did I mention there are save points? There are roughly three dozen spread out across the game. If you die in between these you will be respawned somewhat near where you bought it, but in the final chapter of the game, which is one extended action sequence, these points are fairly far apart. I spent over an hour just getting back to one point that I’d gotten stymied on the day before. What does this game developer have against save games, anyway? How does forcing me to replay huge chunks of the game improve my gaming experience?

There are a few things I liked about Jekyll & Hyde. Once I got over my initial surprise that the story has nothing to do with Victorian London, I found the exploration of the subterranean passages to be fun. I also liked the implementation of some of the logic puzzles, few as they are. Nothing you haven’t solved before, but well integrated. I had the sound turned completely off and the graphics settings on the lowest of the low in order to get the game to run on my laptop, but I went back later to listen to the music and thought it was nicely atmospheric. I even enjoyed some of the “action” puzzles — the mazes and the swinging blades of death and that sort of thing. Also, once the game is installed, all eight gigs of it, you don’t have to keep the DVD in the drive! Bonus points for that.

The other thing I did admire about J&H is that it offers action other than the act of extermination. There are, believe it or not, action-adventure hybrids that I have played and enjoyed. In fact, I just recently completed Alone in the Dark, practically the first such offering, a DOS game from 1992. Like J&H it mixes puzzle-solving with exploration and survival. And like J&H its controls are less than smooth. But unlike J&H, Alone in the Dark has a better story, a better mixture of action and adventure elements and it lets you save whenever you darn well feel like it.

I still think the greatest action-adventure game is Tomb Raider. In fact, I’d bet that its great success in the Nineties is what spawned the many attempts to follow in Lara’s footsteps. I still play the DOS TR1 demo from 1995 from time to time. It takes up only a few megabytes and still offers silky smooth 3D third-person action. Though there is plenty of shooting and fighting in Tomb Raider, it was and is still primarily about exploration, adventure and 3D puzzle-solving. I have to believe that this is what Cyan was attempting to duplicate with URU — to make a true 3D world with physical puzzles. Lara has to change her environment to make progress. Move a block here, climb a ledge there. That’s what makes TR great, not Lara’s pistols.

If you are going to give J&H a go, I think you need hardware close to the high end of the system requirements listed below. I also have to believe the game has got to work better with a game controller. I did get the chance to play about a quarter of J&H on a computer with a 256-meg graphics card, which decidedly helped with the “lag” between keypress and onscreen result and the lurching camera swings, though the character controls remained clumsy. I didn’t bother to turn the voices back on because outside of the rather cheesy coloring book cutscenes that crop up at the end of each of the game’s six chapters, the dialogue mostly consists of Mr. Hyde going, “Ugh, me strong!” Oh, and don’t turn off the tutorial mode — at one point the game stops responding if you have it off. So much for beta testing. The game has been rated “T” for teen, but aside from the usual cartoon mayhem there is absolutely nothing objectionable in it. I’m still scratching my head over the ESRB listing of “Partial Nudity.”

Jekyll & Hyde is not a complete disaster. It’s got a confused, nonsensical story and an awkward mixture of action and adventure elements, but it does try to be something more than just another shoot-em-up. I’d say that it’s a “B” adventure slapped onto a “C plus” actioner with, alas, “F” character controls. It’s the latter that really does this game in. Overall, I give Dr. J and Mr. H a C minus.

Minimum System Requirements:

• Operating System Windows XP, ServicePack2
• DirectX 9.0c (will be installed if required)
• Processor 1.5 GHz
• RAM 512 MB for Windows XP/Windows 7;
  1024 MB for Windows Vista
• Graphics card 128 MB (for low texture settings)
• Pixel Shader 3.0
• The following graphics cards and any newer
  Pixel Shader 3.0 compatible versions:
• nVidia Geforce 6800
• Radeon X1800
• Sound card DirectX 9.0c compatible
• Hard disk Minimum of 8.5 GB free space
• DVD drive DVD-ROM

Recommended System Requirements:

• Operating System Windows XP, ServicePack2/Windows Vista/
  Windows 7
• DirectX 9.0c (will be installed if required)
• Processor 2.5 GHz
• RAM ≥ 2048 MB
• Graphics card 256MB (for medium texture settings)
  1024 MB (for high texture settings)
  • nVidia Geforce 8800 or better
  • Radeon HD-2900 or better
• Sound card ≥ 4.0 channel, DirectX 9.0c compatible
• Hard disk Minimum of 8.5 GB free space
• DVD drive DVD-ROM