The Mysterious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde review for Nintendo Switch

My expectations for The Mysterious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde going into the game were insanely low. It?s a hidden object game, and even if I love the genre, I?m not going to pretend they?re anything more than mindless time wasters. On top of that, it?s from Ocean Media, whose track record is not great, to put it mildly. To round it all out, this is a port of a decade-old DS game that got a bad reception the first time around. Basically, if the game could run without crashing, I?d consider it a mild success.

I still expected too much. Not only is the game abysmal, it also crashed on me a few times, so it doesn?t even have “it works” as a point in its favour. Mind you, those crashes meant I got a few blissful moments away from The Mysterious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as I waited for the game to restart, so I may need to rethink my stance on “working” as being a net-positive.

Because seriously, even by the low standards of hidden object games, this one is bad. No one seems to have done any kind of quality control, so misspellings are common. At one point, I spent about ten minutes trying to figure out what the game was looking for when it asked me to find a “pow”, until I finally gave up, used up a precious hint, and discovered they actually meant “paw”. That may seem obvious, but given we?re talking about a hidden object game, it?s not out of the realm of possibility that they literally wanted me to find the letters P-O-W.

What made this especially annoying was the use of a hint. As I just wrote, they?re precious, since the game doles them out very sparingly. Unlike most hidden object games, where you have to wait for the hint meter to refill, here you can only carry five at any one time, and once they?re gone, they?re gone, with few opportunities to pick up one extra hint here and there.

There are two things, though, that really put The Mysterious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a few tiers below your standard hidden object game. The first is that some objects that the game asked me to find weren?t even present. I don?t mean that in the sense of “Wow, that was really camouflaged,” I mean that they literally weren?t included in the level. In one level in particular, I was asked to find a witch, and despite my best efforts, couldn?t spot anything. When I finally gave up and used a hint, it pointed me to a space where there was literally nothing to click. I dutifully pressed the blank space, and was able to finish the level, but that was when I really gave up on The Mysterious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde having even the slightest bit of value.

Up to that point, I was merely feeling angry at how terrible this game?s hit detection was. I know that these games can often be a bit finicky in where you press on an object, but in this case, it wasn?t uncommon for me to press on an object ten times and have nothing happen, only for the eleventh time to magically work.

I honestly didn?t know it was possible for a hidden object game to fail this miserably. And yet, every step of the way, The Mysterious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde achieves that dubious honour. I don?t know why someone decided that a ten-year-old DS game with bad reviews needed to be revived, because abominations like this should stay dead and buried in the past.

Ocean Media provided us with a Mysterious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Switch code for review purposes.