written by David Steffen
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a classic science fiction/fantasy novel written by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (also well known for writing Treasure Island), first published in 1886. I’m assuming most people are familiar with at least the basic premise of the story, which is not actually evident until about 2/3 of the way through the novel, but I’m not going to avoid spoiling a 130-year old book whose premise has been spoofed so many times in pop culture.
The point of view character of the book is Gabriel Utterson, a lawyer who investigates strange events surrounding his friend the good Dr. Henry Jekyll and the mysterious and malevolent Edward Hyde. One strange occurrence happens after another–strange behavior on the part of Dr. Jekyll and the unnatural and immediate revulsion every single person feels in the present of Mr. Hyde. Utterson and others, such as mutual friend Dr. Lanyon investigate these strange happenings to understand the plight of Mr. Jekyll.
As probably everyone already knows, it turns out that Mr. Hyde is actually an alter-ego for Dr. Jekyll. Jekyll has a wild side to his personality that he has indulged only in secret–he has found a potion which brings that portion of himself to the surface. Jekyll himself is a mix of good and evil as all of us are, but Mr. Hyde is pure evil–selfish and malevolent and spiteful. The story is an exploration of the dual side of human nature and the consequences of giving in to temptation and your darker side.
I really enjoyed the story, once it finally got the real explanation for Jekyll’s strange behavior and we actually find out all the details of his struggle. There’s a lot of interesting things about the situation, the dual nature and dual motivations. That part of the book I found consistently riveting and interesting.
Unfortunately, we don’t actually get to find any out any of the details until about 2/3 of the way through the book. Perhaps this was only really really frustrating because I already knew what the secret is and the entire reason I was reading the book in the first place was to find all the details, but I found that first 2/3 of the book insufferably slow. I don’t think it’s simply a difference in the era’s writing style–I tend to love science fiction/fantasy stories from that era–I didn’t have the same complaint about Frankenstein, Dracula, or War of the Worlds, so in my opinion it was this book specifically that I had problems with the pacing.
If you’re like me, and you read the book primarily to find out the details of the original Jekyll/Hyde relationship after seeing a lifetime of derivative works… just keep that in mind.
The controls of the game are very simple–a 20-second timer is counting down, but you have plenty of time to try something, anything, which you do by clicking on objects in the scene. In many cases the bomb is not even visible so you don’t always even have a clear objective, but your path is the same–try clicking on everything.
Visuals
Visuals
Story
Using bodies as stepping stones to cross spike pits, to weight down switches, or to scale spike walls, new puzzle components are added every few levels to keep things fresh, though the game felt too drawn out at times so that the level felt somewhat repetitive.
Challenge
A man walks through the night, carrying a staff and a baby. He knocks on a door, gives the baby to a woman there, and then keeps walking. The baby becomes a man, and henchmen come pounding on the door. The boy flees the men through the night, eventually finding refuge in the mysterious and deadly Tesla Tower.
If you die you just restart in the room where you died, so there isn’t a big penalty for meeting your death–which is good because some of the puzzles are very challenging and it would be very frustrating if dying did have more of a penalty.
As you work your way up the career ladder you are given tasks by the company dictating how you need to process the input values that come in on one conveyor belt and produce output values to send on the next conveyor belt. When the game starts you have only a couple simple instructions, Input (which grabs a value off the input belt), and Output (which puts whatever value is in your hands onto the output belt). But soon those instructions expand to include add/subtract operators, conditional branches, unconditional branches, storing values in memory, to retrieving values from variables by reference. The challenges get more complex as you work your way up the career path, and there are extra difficult side-branches you can take if you’re up for a challenge.
On each level you can move on if you solve the problem, but you can reach extra achievements if you try to finish optimization challenges. If you can complete the goal under a target amount of instructions in your program, then you will get one achievement. If you can complete the goal with a runtime under a target amount, then you’ll get another. In many cases you will not be able to get both achievements with the same program because in many cases the goals are somewhat counter to each other–reducing the number of instructions means you reuse lines of code as much as possible, but that requires extra jump commands that add to your runtime. The optimization programs will probably be easier if you have a programming background and have covered some material about optimizing code (even though these days most compilers will handle most speed optimizations for you it’s still not a bad idea to understand the concepts). If you want a major hint at optimizing for speed though, search for the term “loop unrolling”–that is the single biggest concept that I used to optimize the first half of the challenges (after that it got harder and I ended up focusing more on just passing the main objective).
