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Categories: Review
Tags: ds, survival horror
Dementium: The Ward
Developer: Renegade Kid
Publisher: Gamecock Media Group
Platform: Nintendo DS
Released: 10/31/2007
When it comes to horror shooters, the DS isn’t an obvious platform, but Dementium succeeds where Touch the Dead failed. Within the first five minutes of playing Dementium, you’ve seen a nurse dragged away by an obese monster called The Cleaver, discovered a code scrawled in blood, and found a note asking, “Why did you do it?”
Other than the note and a few other scattered clues, you’re an unnamed patient trapped in Redmoor Hospital—simultaneously a sprawling medical facility and a high security asylum. Following a pretty standard FPS mold, Dementium starts you off with a nightstick for close quarters combat against zombies. As you move through the game, weapons get cooler and enemies get tougher—leading up to hit-and-run boss battles.
Beyond being a horror-themed FPS, Dementium is legitimately scary. Playing out over 16 menacingly titled chapters (“The Electric Buzz-saw;” “The Door with no Handle”), Dementium has a sense of pacing, filling out the story with discordant flashbacks and well timed cutscenes. It’s impossible not to be chilled by sequences involving holding cockroaches at bay with a flashlight or exploring an infant ward where worms have taken over the incubators.
The controls are excellent, using the D-pad to move the player and the stylus to steer. Shoulder buttons act as triggers and activating the menu pauses the game, allowing the player to inspect inventory (items needed for puzzles, weapons, and ammunition — pill bottles are used immediately and cannot be saved for later), access maps, and make notes on a notepad. Dementium’s mapping system is crude, but gameplay is often linear and only requires backtracking in a few levels.
Early in the game, Dementium impresses with a solid 3D engine backed by convincing graphics. Later, as lightning flashes illuminate rooms, monsters burst through doors, and rain falls from the sky, words like solid and convincing fall by the wayside. Dementium not only presents an M-rated alternative for DS gamers, but does so with panache.
It’s more the shame then, that Dementium is crippled by a lousy save system. While the game autosaves as players move around in a level, that autosave is only useful if you want to put the game down and pick up where you left off later. If you die in a level, it’s back to the beginning of the chapter. Nothing deflates a game faster than pointless repetition. Boss battles are challenging enough without forcing the player to relive the twenty minutes of gameplay leading up to them. Suddenly, enemies are more annoying than scary and players are too busy running through hallways to appreciate Dementium’s textures.
Indie developer Renegade Kid has accomplished something great with Dementium. It’s too bad that my lasting impression is “annoyingly frustrating,” instead of “horrifically terrifying.”