Dr. Jekyll Goes Wild Slot – Free Demo

A locking wild in a Victorian street

Light & Wonder is next to have a try with the Big Bet mechanic, in Victorian themed slot Dr. Jekyll Goes Wild. The Big Bet game here is five linked spins played as one block, with a Bonus Trail attached to them. Light & Wonder has opted to introduce a bit of an old school quirk to it all. That quirk is the potion, which turns a run of Jekyll Free Spins into Hyde Spins with no set length. Alongside the modern dynamic is a bonus game filled with a locking wild and a round that carries on until a timer says otherwise; this is literary horror gaming in a modern setting. The timer in question is a Sand Timer, and it only counts when it lands on reel 5. So, does it succeed?

I might have used the term 'modern', yet the backdrop is thoroughly old, and there's sort of no option when employing this theme where a gas-lit street sits behind the reels, the classic Jekyll and Hyde appearance. It's brightly attractive, though nothing you haven't seen a dozen times before. My testing ran at a 5.00 stake, comfortably above the 2.00 mark where the stated return steps up.

Dr. Jekyll Goes Wild starts up on any device. Free spins landed seven times across my 390 spin session. The Big Bet game is priced at 20.00, 30.00, 40.00 and 50.00, and it's a game that doesn't demand much patience to reach the good parts since triggering free spins arrived often enough in testing. The waits were uneven all the same, with one gap of 63 spins between rounds and another of 167. RTP sits at 96.20% at stakes of 2.00 and up, a figure comfortably above average. My own 390 spins came back at 108.3% of what went in, so the run finished ahead of that. It falls to 94.20% below that, though, and rises to 98.11% inside the Big Bet game.

Ten lines under a gas lamp

Five reels bear ten pay lines, all of them live at every stake level, and line wins pay left to right on successive reels from the far left reel. Wins on every played line are added together into the spin total. Only the largest win pays per line. Line wins are multiplied by the stake per line, so in a nutshell, you have a simple enough base game. With ten lines always in play, the stake per line is a tenth of the bet, so a 5.00 spin carries 0.50 a line.

A winning combination is created when matching symbols land from the first reel onwards, and at the top of the scale we find the Dr. Jekyll street scene. It is one of only two symbols that pay from two of a kind, the clock tower being the other. It is worth x500 the stake per line for five, which is 500 times the entire stake across all ten lines. Four on a line pays x200 the stake per line and three pays x50. Also lifting up the win rate is a wild. It substitutes all other symbols, except the potion.

What the potion does to a free spins round

Players gain from free spins triggered by split Jekyll/Hyde symbols, as well as the Big Bet game. Land 3 or more in the base game and the round begins. Three of them was the common trigger in my run, and the most a ten spin round paid me was 90.00 off a 5.00 stake. 3 symbols grant 10 free spins, 4 grant 15, and 5 grant 20, and bet per line and live pay lines remain as they were on the triggering spin. Every round I saw dealt one of those three counts, ten of them most often. Landing 2 or more wilds during the round retriggers it, with 2 granting 3 more free spins, 3 granting 10, 4 granting 15 and 5 granting 20. Only one of my seven rounds retriggered.

The potion only shows on reel 1. Landing with a wild during Jekyll Free Spins, it converts the round into Unlimited Hyde Spins, and these carry on with no fixed count until a Sand Timer lands anywhere on reel 5. Bet per line and the active lines stay as they were on the triggering spin through the Hyde Spins too. At that point the timer either keeps Hyde Spins going or passes the round back to Jekyll Spins, where the leftover free spins are played out. The timer spins for that decision itself, stopping on green to carry on or red to hand back. The Hyde Wild locks in place for the remainder of the Hyde Spins and substitutes for everything except the Sand Timer.

The Big Bet game is five connected spins. Each of them uses all the win lines and pays from the same awards table as the base game. Wins are collected and paid after the final one, and free spins can trigger inside it. Every split Jekyll/Hyde symbol in view moves the Bonus Trail one spot. They count wherever they land in view, not only on a pay line. Whatever spot you finish on is awarded as free spins, up to 75, and the four trails run Dr. Jekyll at 20.00 (5/10/15/20/25/75), Super at 30.00 (10/15/20/25/30/75), Mega at 40.00 (5/10/20/25/30/75) and Ultra at 50.00 (10/20/25/30/75). Those free spins start as soon as the fifth Big Bet spin has finished.

The Minty Summary: Seven bonus rounds over 390 spins paid 568.00 between them, 27% of everything the session won, though the single biggest win of the run, 370.00 on spin 386, landed on an ordinary base spin; the ten-line five-reel frame is one Light & Wonder has kept in service through Rainbow Riches Free Spins and Starmania 2, and here it carries a potion, a Sand Timer and a locking Hyde Wild.

390 spins with Dr. Jekyll

Light & Wonder demonstrates there are still evolutionary openings for old-fashioned line gaming, just as evolution didn't stop by us growing thumbs, like Bill Hicks might have said. In one respect, Dr. Jekyll Goes Wild displays how transferable the Big Bet set up is, and I've viewed vanilla versions, in-game jackpot versions, and now a Stevenson version. Is the time right for a host of classic slot refreshes? With the likes of Light & Wonder on board, the flood gates could be blown wide open.

Dr. Jekyll Goes Wild does suffer the same shortcomings as earlier incarnations, namely that the peripheries may vary, but the central gaming, the grind, is the same old, same old. That grind ran 1,950.00 through the reels in my session. Grind it does, though not through dead spins. The longest stretch without a win was nine spins, ending on spin 50. Across 390 spins at 5.00 a spin, 158 of them paid something, and 91 of those paid less than the stake back. That works out at a hit rate of 41%. Often you get a bonus round stack up over ten or fifteen free spins. Two of mine ran to 20 free spins. Yet you are left pondering where the remainder of the payout is after it's been awarded, the largest of the seven I triggered returning 27 times the stake. The seven together paid 568.00, which was 27% of everything the session won.

One pleasant touch is the Bonus Trail filling in during Big Bet, showing how many free spins you have banked, and the fact the finishing spot isn't set adds a bit of suspense since you never know quite where it will halt. Once triggered, Dr. Jekyll Goes Wild begins to make more sense and distinguish itself from the others in the range. My biggest single win of the session came outside the features, 370.00 on spin 386. The max win has been capped at 250,000.00 in any single game. The rules add that not every stake configuration can reach that limit. Again, modest symbol values hold you back since a run of free spins can easily add up to not much at all. One of my 20 spin rounds handed back 33.00, or 6.6 times the stake. My best bonus paid 135.00 off a 5.00 stake, and the entire session ended at 1,162.50 from 1,000.00. The balance peaked at 1,182.50 on spin 386 and dropped as low as 579.50 along the way.

Dr. Jekyll Goes Wild doesn't equal the gold standards of the genre. Across my 390 spins it returned 2,112.50 on 1,950.00 staked. But admirers of locking wilds or open-ended bonus rounds might get something out of it, and Light & Wonder has fitted the mechanic with a feature not seen in them yet.

Where else the trail shows up

If you want to see more slots using the Big Bet mechanic, Light & Wonder's back catalogue is the place to search. This version adds the potion, the Sand Timer and the locking Hyde Wild on top of the trail. The studio has fitted the five connected spins and their trails to plenty of its other slots.