When Robert Louis Stevenson sat down to write The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he was trying to create something that spoke about the duality of the human experience: the light and dark, good and evil.
I am sure that when the writers of this game sat down, they wanted to make a game that somehow showed that. Sadly, while Stevenson wrote the quintessential gothic horror novel, the makers of this game created a steaming pile of… poop.
You play as Dr. Jekyll, a man who leads a double life. You see, when Dr. Jekyll eats a banana he becomes… wait no, that's Eric and Banana Man. Dr. Jekyll made a potion which splits his personality. On the one hand he is the good Dr. Jekyll and on the other the evil Mr. Hyde. In the book, he spends his time generally trying desperately not to turn into Mr. Hyde, who has the unfortunate desire to murder people.
So, of course, with some awesome source material you know this is going to be a great game.
The plot of the game is a bit different than the book. For a start, you, as Dr. Jekyll, have to get to the church so he can marry his fiancée. A simple enough task, but on the way he has to avoid everything that will anger him. So people who are vaping or riding their bikes on the pavement, for example. Except, of course, this is Victorian England so the annoyance needs to be more period-specific. We will come to those in a minute.
If he becomes enraged enough he turns into Mr. Hyde who has to battle demons… Okay, I don't remember that bit in the book. To be fair it would make a really cool manga but isn’t exactly the idea the book was going for.
Let's Actually Try and Play This
Let's actually try and play this.
There is a woman and a man who are walking. They don’t look very dangerous so I walk straight past them, so I guess not everyone is out to annoy me. Except I appear to have been attacked by the woman. Why?
According to the manual, I remind her of her dead husband and so she attacks me. WTF, it's not my fault I look like her dead husband, and even if I do, why is she attacking her dead husband? Is she angry because he is dead and so attacks him when she sees him? That sentence made no sense at all and yet is still more sane than this game.
Apparently if I press B I brandish a cane. Now we are talking, she wants to attack me again, she will be on the receiving end of my cane.
Okay, this guy is the same as the guy before but he is orange, and as we all know in the world of 8-bit gaming that means he is actually a totally different dude. Why does he walk really freaking quickly?
I appear to be dead. I don’t know why, I thought Ghosts 'n Goblins was hard! Apparently I am not dead, instead it's nighttime and I am now Mr. Hyde and yep, I am now dead. Apparently I got hit by a lightning bolt the very second the level started. Talk about rotten luck.
Try again… Okay, this time a little boy is shooting at me with his catapult. Apparently he is Billy Ponce and he fancies my future wife and that means he gets to shoot me. Since when has this been a valid reason for assault with a weapon? More importantly, this is Victorian England, why is he not down a mine, stuck up a chimney or dying of polio?
I was hoping that if I hit him with my cane he would explode or maybe just run away, but apparently hitting him does nothing. To be fair he has probably already been beaten half to death by a schoolmaster.
Ah, now here comes the red dude. According to the manual he is the Bomb Manic, which would be a cool rapper name, but in this case he just likes to leave bombs lying around instead of spitting some sick rhymes. To be fair, if you are going to give your kids names like that you can’t really be shocked when they grow up to be a bit of an oddball, can you?
A house, maybe I can find sanctuary and perhaps sanity inside. Apparently not, it would appear that going into the house does nothing at all. I am really starting to think this game was rushed. Oddly, Billy Ponce is able to go into the house as well and he can shoot me even though I can't see him.
I am really starting to question the people who made this game. Did they try to make it unplayable? Is it a meta joke about rage?
Now I am Mr. Hyde again, except this time I don’t die instantly from a stray lightning bolt. No, instead it's a flying rock! Which is apparently a demon, because of course it is.
I don’t want to play anymore, there is nothing fun in this game at all.
The Japanese and Western Versions
Apparently there are two versions of this game. One is the western release and the other the Japanese release. Why two versions, I hear you cry?
It boils down to the way the different cartridges were produced. Both cartridges had 128 KB of PRG-ROM, which is where the game's code and other data is stored. In the Japanese cart, 48 KB of graphics data was stored inside the PRG-ROM. The cartridge used something called CHR-RAM, which allowed the game to copy the graphics from the PRG-ROM into the PPU for the NES to use.
When the Western version was produced, the cartridge hardware was changed to use 32 KB of CHR-ROM instead. As you can tell by the name this was read-only, and so the graphics now had to be stored in dedicated memory, but there was only 32 KB of space available, compared with the roughly 48 KB of graphics data used by the Japanese version. That's 16 KB less.
So some of the Japanese graphics couldn't be carried over to the Western cartridge, and the sections of the game that relied on them had to be cut or changed. Interestingly, some of the unused graphics data was still sitting inside the 128 KB PRG-ROM. It hadn't necessarily been deleted, it simply couldn't be used as graphics by the new cartridge hardware.
So How Bad Is It?
I was aware that this game has a reputation for being awful and I wanted to see just how bad it was. What is frustrating is that actually the graphics are really nice; you can actually tell what everything is supposed to be and the backgrounds really give a Victorian London kind of feel. It’s just a shame it was let down by some terrible programming.
When I was researching this article I came across a review by someone who shall remain nameless, who insisted that the game was bad, but misunderstood. They wrote a lot about the game hidden under the terrible game on top, and how you didn’t play this like a normal game… Let me tell you now, there is no hidden game under this game, and if there was, it would still be awful
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
There is no hidden game under this game, and if there was, it would still be awful
there is no hidden game under this game, and if there was, it would still be awful