Jekyll & Hyde | Mystery Story

MazM: Jekyll and Hyde is a fantastic story-driven visual novel, but it gets unfair hate from people who ignore the store description and expect a high-octane action game. Unlike pure visual novels like DDLC that consist of endless, static reading, MazM strikes a perfect balance. You can physically walk Mr. Utterson around Victorian London, clicking on optional details like street posters and interacting with local NPCs like the newsboy. It adds a wonderful layer of detective immersion without the text fatigue. The free version's model is admittedly annoying. Forcing players to sit through ads to unlock a chapter—or gating puzzle hints behind a "Tea Time" energy system—completely ruins the dark, gothic atmosphere. Thankfully, the fix is only $6. Paying for the premium unlock completely removes ads and grants unlimited hints, making it a flawless, uninterrupted experience. If you want a sandbox game, skip this. But if you want a beautiful, interactive literary mystery. Worth the money

Except a few moments where you play a two second "mini game", the entire thing consists of reading. Which is all well and good if that's all you want to do, but it should be stated that this app succeeds as neither a visual novel nor a game. You move the character(s) around a map and look at things and talk to people, acquiring historical factoids along the way. That's literally it. The only thing that qualifies this as any sort of "game" is the fact that you have to interact with it in the most basic of ways to keep things moving along. (I.e. Talk to so-and-so, then go to such-and-such area to talk to different so-and-so... lather, rinse, repeat) So as a game, it fails. Ironically, this same structure is what makes it fail as a visual novel as well. Whereas in a visual novel you can just sit there and read/watch everything, the app's whole "adventure game exploration/conversation" dynamic draws everything out to such a slow crawl that by the time you're halfway through it you'll be wishing you could just read the actual book. Decent manga-ish art, and decent music, but not worth it. Makes me feel pretty crappy, considering I dropped 10 bucks to unlock the complete app when a copy of the book would have been both cheaper and more satisfying. Oh well.

Where to start with what’s bad with this game? Seems like the “historical facts” were given more attention than the actual game. You can only play as far as ads will allot, so you can only play for about 10 minutes before you run out of coins to move on if you’re not willing to pay large amounts of money. I really don’t see why anyone would. It’s just popping around a map having pointless conversations. I understand they’re trying to tell a story, but this is not a good way to do it. The chapters are waaaay too short. There are no rewards for finishing chapters. You can’t play the additional cases unless you have gold, which is not rewarded or given enough of from watching ads, which interrupts the story. The hints tell you whom to speak to sometimes but not where you have to go on the map so sometimes there’s popping around aimlessly looking for clues. The characters that are standing around in each part of the map serve no purpose. They make unrelated remarks that don’t help a player or advance the story or game. Overall, this is not a good game. Better off reading Wikipedia about the time period for information…or better yet READ A BOOK.