Review: Dementium: the Ward

Dementium: the Ward succeeds in a great number of areas; it’s very atmospheric, the controls are close to spot-on, and it manages to creep you out sufficiently a lot of the time. There are a few flaws, but overall, the good elements of Dementium far outweigh the bad. To find out more about all of the above, read on.

I’d start with the story, as I usually do in reviews, but overall there’s not a whole lot to say. The game pretty much throws you into the hospital headfirst, telling you nothing about why you’re there, and giving you nothing but some random bits of information that will mess with your mind for most of the game. As you continue through the game, all the way up to the end, you never find out much about what’s going on. You’d think the ending would resolve the whole thing, but for me, it just left an even bigger question mark; some parts of the story were unresolved, others were explained away somewhat confusingly, and it doesn’t help that the game hinted at a sequel to follow. But the ending will definitely get you thinking, if not reconsidering the entire game, which I sort of liked.

Luckily for us, the gameplay manages to stand on its own without the help of the story. Renegade Kid has done a great job of making the game very atmospheric; during the first two chapters especially, you are going to be pretty freaked out. Once you get your hands on some firepower, the horror aspect of the game decreases somewhat, but you still retain that sense of "oh man, I could die any minute" and it really sets you on edge. The design of the hospital, with its bloodstained walls and its randomly stacked furniture, helps add to the atmosphere and increase this feeling.

There are three main elements to the game: exploration, puzzles, and gunplay. The exploration element plays out fairly well, as usually there are several branching paths you can take in a level; usually only one leads to the next chapter, while others lead to key items, health or ammo, or occasionally pain and nothing else. To help make this less confusing, the game gives you a map for most of the floors you reach in the hospital, which records locked doors and other such things. One thing it doesn’t record, though, is blocked paths due to furniture, which occurs very often. More than once I looked at my map, wondering "why haven’t I taken this path?", only to go back and remember that it was inaccessible.

The puzzles don’t come into play often, and when they do, they usually require you to go exploring for a certain passcode. Sometimes it’ll be written on the wall, other times it may be a series of riddles; they’re never incredibly difficult, but they manage to shake the game up a little. As a result, the majority of the game involves shooting the various monsters that populate the hospital. This is, fortunately, very entertaining, as each enemy often requires different strategies and weapons, and the game introduces new ones somewhat often while mixing together the old effectively. Not to mention one weapon in particular is incredibly awesome, though despite its being highly powerful it won’t make the game a cakewalk by any means.

The gunplay is augmented by the excellent controls, which have been fine-tuned about as well as they can be. All the action takes place on the top screen, but your stylus acts to change your view on the bottom screen, while the directional pad/buttons move you and the shoulder buttons fire. It sounds wonky on paper, but in practice it’s about as close to a PC mouse-and-keyboard setup as you’re going to get on a non-PC system. This also means that you may often find yourself missing an enemy just because your hand is shaking a bit (yes, the game will make you nervous for your character’s life), which at the moment is frustrating, but is awesome in retrospect. The setup means, though, that the system will probably be held in one hand the entire time, which can get a little tiresome.

While the game is mostly very awesome, there are a few problems that will probably detract from the experience. One that I’m sure many will take issue with is the save system. The game’s save system is entirely automatic, which is good and bad. As soon as you enter a door, your game will be saved, with your current health and ammo recorded. When you die, though, your save file will be sent back to the beginning of the previous chapter and there’s nothing you can do about it. I personally have little issue with this, as I’m glad to see that dying is properly frustrating, as opposed to a minor annoyance. Conversely, though, if you lose a lot of health in one room, you can just turn the game off before you leave the room.

One of the problems I really had with this game is that, while most of the game is consistently good, near the end it starts to lose steam a little bit. The last few chapters have very little exploration, feeling slightly less linear than a level of Super Mario Bros., and they start reusing bosses before they introduce very many at all. The chapters also get much shorter as the game wraps up, which brings me to my other point: this game is short. When I began the final chapter, my game timer read a little under four and a half hours, and by the time I was done it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes longer. Granted, the save system will ensure that you sink more hours into it than the timer suggests, but you still probably won’t play this for more than ten hours, and once you’ve finished that’s pretty much all the game has to offer.

These problems notwithstanding, the fact remains that Dementium: the Ward gives one of the more unique game experiences I’ve had in quite some time, as well as an excellent FPS and DS game in its own right. I give this game a rather spirited Yay!, because it does many things very right, and very few things wrong. Pick this game up if you’re looking for a change of pace, because you’ll get it. What’s most amazing to me is that the staff of Renegade Kid consists of no more than three people; after finishing the game, the credits are extraordinarily short. This brings up the question: if three people, with a little help, can create a game of this caliber, why should we ever settle for less? If anything, you should grab Dementium to show support for great independent efforts like these.